This is a discussion of practical tips for developing RobotPy code that I personally use so I can get things done quicker. Some of these apply to writing robot code too, but that is not what this page is directed towards.
It's best to use the latest version of Python available, but sometimes I lag behind a version because I'm lazy. I also have virtualenvs that use the oldest version of Python that RobotPy supports just in case I need to diagnose things there.
I use Microsoft Visual Studio Code with the pylance extension, and I always have basic type checking enabled in the pyright settings.
I always set up a virtualenv for robotpy development (using virtualenvwrapper to manage my environments), and typically I create a new one per year, and have separate environments that contain only locally built RobotPy projects and ones that only contain artifacts from PyPI. In particular, on Linux I find that I can't compile/link against packages that were built on PyPI because of compiler differences. YMMV.
If you're doing C++ development, make sure to install ccache. I have 64GB of RAM and a fast SSD, more cores are better.
For all the pure python pieces of robotpy, you can follow standard python package development practices. I find installing packages in editable mode makes life a lot easier because you can just edit and test in place:
cd project
pip install --no-build-isolation -e .Not much else to say here.
For the C++ portions of RobotPy (which is all the WPILib and vendor code), I do all of my development on macOS and Linux. You can do it on Windows too, but I can't help you much there.
All of our C++ code uses robotpy-build to automatically generate wrappers around various robot code. It's worth learning about how it works (read the docs here) if you're going to try to change anything -- but the basic idea is that pyproject.toml has a list of C++ header files that are being wrapped, gen/*.yml has configuration files that modify the code generation for the header files, and sometimes there are C++ files sprinkled in that do various things too.
robotpy-build wraps everything in pybind11. If you're going to do anything major, you'll probably want to read the pybind11 documentation (it's great!).
When compiling, I have these environment variables set to speed things up:
export RPYBUILD_PARALLEL=1 # tell robotpy-build to compile in parallel
export CC="ccache gcc" # tell setuptools to use ccache
export CXX="ccache g++"
export GCC_COLORS=1
export RPYBUILD_DEBUG=1 # tell robotpy-build to add debug symbols
export RPYBUILD_PP_GCC=1 # tell robotpy-buildYou're not supposed to do this anymore, but when I want to install my robotpy-build based projects in editable mode, I always run python setup.py develop -N instead of using pip or uv. It's shorter, and setuptools and pip keep changing how things work -- and also, this always uses the same build directory (instead of a random one) so this allows ccache to work correctly too. In 2026 we should be moving away from setuptools and then we can use modern python practices instead.
When doing development on mostrobotpy, there's an rdev.sh script that can be used to do most common build related things, see --help for details.