Development Environment

mercure has been developed using Python (and C++ for the getdcmtags module). It depends on various Python packages that are listed in the file requirements.txt.

A development environment can be easily created using Vagrant, as described in the Quick Start section. When working under Windows, it is alternatively possible to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2). It is recommended to use a systemd-type installation of mercure for development work because in this case the code is not distributed across multiple containers.

Note

If running the Vagrant installation without additional parameters (“vagrant up”), the latest stable version of mercure will be installed, corresponding to the repository commit currently tagged with latest-stable. To install the newest development version, add the argument --dev to the Vagrant command (”vagrant --dev up”). This mercure version has the newest features but may be incomplete and still unstable. Use this version with caution.

We highly recommend using Visual Studio Code as code editor. Depending on your individual setup, the code inside your mercure development environment can be edited from your host operating system using the Remote - SSH or Remote - WSL extensions for VS Code.

For building the getdcmtags C++ module, we recommend using the Qt5 SDK with QtCreator. A project file for QtCreator is included in the repository (getdcmtags.pro). Make sure to copy the compiled binary (i.e., the Release build) into the subfolder for the correct Ubuntu version inside the /bin folder.

getdcmtags depends on the development version of DCMTK, which can be installed with

sudo apt install libdcmtk-dev