Getting Started¶

Before starting to develop for Assemblyline, you will need to set up your environment. We have a couple of options to assist you, from a free-to-use and easy-to-setup script to more complex setups.

Development virtual machine¶

Whether you are developing a new service or working on core components, Assemblyline requires specific external packages and files installed in specific directories in the containers. For this reason, it is recommended that you do not develop directly from your desktop unless you use remote debugging features.

The minimum specifications for development virtual machine¶

There are quite a few containers to run to spin-up the Assemblyline dependencies. For this reason, the development VM should have at least the following specifications:

2 cores
8 GB of RAM
40 GB of disk space

Operating system¶

We recommend that you use Ubuntu for your development VM, because all instructions that we provide in the document has been built with this OS in mind. There are two versions that you can pick from:

[Recommended] Ubuntu 24.04 Desktop
- For local development where your IDE runs in the same VM as the Assemblyline containers
Ubuntu 24.04 Server
- For remote development where your IDE runs on your local computer and the Assemblyline containers run on the VM

Choosing your IDE¶

Many IDEs will give you the features needed to do development. We have seen setups using a combination of terminal tools, PyCharm, and others. We documented a more complete setup using VSCode which support local and remote development:

VSCode¶

This is our recommended IDE since it is free and very easy to setup. Most of the Assemblyline team has moved to this IDE and we use a mix of local and remote development with it. Once you're done installing your VM, you can follow the instructions to get VSCode up and running using our simple setup script.

For instructions on how to use VSCode, refer to the "use VSCode" documentation.