Installing Mathematica Packages for developers

Most users should install the Mathematica packages via the Paclet server. However if you are working on developing a new feature or bugfix for a package you may wish to have Mathematica instead load a version directly from a git repository. You will find the link to the GitHub repository at the bottom of each of the individual package webpages.

Once you have a local copy of the repository cloned, you can then direct Mathematica to use that version of the package using PacletDirectoryLoad (PacletDirectoryAdd in versions of Mathematica prior to 12.1). For example, if you have the git repository for the Teukolsky package in ~/BHPToolkit/Teukolsky, then you would use the following commands to load that version of the package:

PacletDirectoryLoad["~/BHPToolkit/Teukolsky"]
<< Teukolsky`

Note that if you have previously used the packages prior to the development of the paclet system, you may already have them installed in the Applications folder inside your UserBaseDirectory. To avoid confusion, it is recommended that you remove these versions or move them elsewhere on your computer.

If you are looking for things to work on in a particular package then a good place to start is by looking at the issue tracker. More information about that can be found on our issue tracker info page.

If you are working on the webpage for a package then see our gh-pages guide.

Developers may also be interested in seeing the pages on Creating Documentation and Creating Paclets.