Debugging locally

It's possible to run and debug the application locally with virtual environments.

Do this before opening VSCode:

# Generate the virtual environment directory
python3 -m venv .venv
# Switch to it
source .venv/bin/activate
# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

Then, open VSCode with the project, and it should automatically detect and switch to the virtual environment in the terminal.

Copy config.example.toml to config.toml and configure your settings.

To run the project, just run ./run.sh. It will read config.toml and run the various Python scripts.

The last step fails, as it's trying to write to GPIO, but that's not an issue since the aim of local development is to generate and view the data/screen_output.png.

To debug the project, open a Python script file such as scripts/screen_calendar_get.py or scripts/screen_weather_get.py, and press F5. It will use config.toml for settings and run the script. It can hit breakpoints too.