zabackary / vexmason

A comprehensive build system for VEX V5 Python, extensible and easy to integrate with modules support and more

vexmason

Get started now! Go make a copy of the vexmason template

vexmason is a comprehensive build system for VEX V5 Python. It lets you modularize and refactor your code into maintainable and modern OOP Python classes and files within the V5 ecosystem.

vexmason acts as a compiler/bundler for Python, like Rollup is for JS, and makes it so you can write your code in different modules and rely on the tooling to condense it into an uploadable single Python file. It also lets you do CPP-style #define at compile-time!

vexmason utilizes python-compiler to bundle the files, which I also wrote.

Features

• Integrate into the native VEX VSCode extension and bundle files behind- the-scenes.
• Read a config file and substitute defined constants.
• (in progress) Lets you select possible constant values from a UI.

Installation

Note

VEXMason is only supported on Windows for now. The code is cross-platform, though, so as soon as I finish initial development I'll work on supporting Linux. Please let me know if you would like to try to build on OSX.

Installation is easy. Just head over to the GitHub releases page and download/run the installer.exe file associated with the latest release. Windows will (probably) flag the file as "unsafe". If you trust me, you can ignore it. If you don't, read the code and compile it from the source yourself.

Configuration

vexmason will only run on directories with both a vex_project_settings.json file AND a vexmason-config.json file in the .vscode directory. You should also have a vexmason-local-config.json file there too. The format is:

vexmason-config.json

{
  "config_version": "1.1",
  "name": "{{ defines/__AUTONOMOUS_ROUTE__ }} | vexmason template",
  "description": "A description. If ommited, vexmason will generate one for you.",
  "language": "python",
  "default_defines": {
    "__AUTONOMOUS_ROUTE__": "route1"
  }
}

vexmason-local-config.json

{
  "config_version": "1.1",
  "computer_name": "your computer name, can be used like {{ computer-name }} in `name` and `description` fields",
  "defines_overrides": {
    "__COMPETITION_MODE__": false
  }
}

Note config_version: it indicates the vexmason config version the config was written for. vexmason will error if it doesn't support the version. The latest version is 1.1 with support for types in defines.

Development

Building

You'll need the Rust compiler (rustc) and Cargo installed to build this project, as it's written in Rust. The easiest way to do this is through rustup.

Once you've done that, you can build the project with cargo build and/or run the code with cargo run --bin {binary name}. There are three main binaries built: the vexcom binary, the main binary ("vexmason"), and the installer ("installer").

Steps to put the binaries in the right place

1. Run the installer. That's it. It will fetch the binaries from GitHub, though, so| make sure you trust me.

or

1. Navigate to ~/.vscode/extensions/vexcode-{version}/resources/tools/vexcom/{platform} and rename the existing vexcom or vexcom.exe to vexcom.old or vexcom.old.exe. Tip: make a backup and name it something like vexcom.bak beforehand in case something goes wrong.
2. Take your built vexcom.exe file (the one you built in Building) and make a copy of it in that directory.
3. Create the installation directory at %LOCALAPPDATA%/vexmason and git clone python-compiler into ./lib/python-compiler.
4. Make a copy of your built vexmason.exe and put it in ./bin.