This document describes how to setup your environment with Python and Poetry, if you're working on new features or a bug fix for Semantic Kernel, or simply want to run the tests included.

Make sure you have an OpenAI API Key or Azure OpenAI service key

There are two methods to manage keys, secrets, and endpoints:

1. Store them in environment variables. SK Python leverages pydantic settings to load keys, secrets, and endpoints. This means that there is a first attempt to load them from environment variables. The .env file naming applies to how the names should be stored as environment variables.

2. If you'd like to use the .env file, you will need to configure the .env file with the following keys into a .env file (see the .env.example file):

OPENAI_API_KEY=""
OPENAI_ORG_ID=""
AZURE_OPENAI_CHAT_DEPLOYMENT_NAME=""
AZURE_OPENAI_TEXT_DEPLOYMENT_NAME=""
AZURE_OPENAI_EMBEDDING_DEPLOYMENT_NAME=""
AZURE_OPENAI_ENDPOINT=""
AZURE_OPENAI_API_KEY=""

You will then configure the Text/ChatCompletion class with the keyword argument env_file_path:

chat_completion = OpenAIChatCompletion(service_id="test", env_file_path=<path_to_file>)

This optional env_file_path parameter will allow pydantic settings to use the .env file as a fallback to read the settings.

If using the second method, we suggest adding a copy of the .env file under these folders:

• python/tests
• ./samples/getting_started.

To get started, you'll need VSCode and a local installation of Python 3.8+.

You can run:

    python3 --version ; pip3 --version ; code -v

to verify that you have the required dependencies.

Check that you've cloned the repository to ~/workspace or a similar folder. Avoid /mnt/c/ and prefer using your WSL user's home directory.

Ensure you have the WSL extension for VSCode installed (and the Python extension for VSCode installed).

You'll also need pip3 installed. If you don't yet have a python3 install in WSL, you can run:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip

ℹ️ Note: if you don't have your PATH setup to find executables installed by pip3, you may need to run ~/.local/bin/poetry install and ~/.local/bin/poetry shell instead. You can fix this by adding export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH" to your ~/.bashrc and closing/re-opening the terminal._

Poetry allows to use SK from the local files, without worrying about paths, as if you had SK pip package installed.

To install Poetry in your system, first, navigate to the directory containing this README using your chosen shell. You will need to have Python 3.8+ installed.

Install the Poetry package manager and create a project virtual environment. Note: SK requires at least Poetry 1.2.0.

# Install poetry package
pip3 install poetry

# optionally, define which python version you want to use
poetry env use python3.11

# Use poetry to install base project dependencies
poetry install

# If you want to get all dependencies for tests installed, use
# poetry install --with tests
# example: poetry install --with hugging_face

# Use poetry to activate project venv
poetry shell

# Optionally, you can install the pre-commit hooks
poetry run pre-commit install
# this will run linters and mypy checks on all the changed code.

Open any of the .py files in the project and run the Python: Select Interpreter command from the command palette. Make sure the virtual env (venv) created by poetry is selected. The python you're looking for should be under ~/.cache/pypoetry/virtualenvs/semantic-kernel-.../bin/python.

If prompted, install ruff and black (these should have been installed as part of poetry install).

You can run the unit tests under the tests/unit folder.

    cd python
    poetry install
    poetry run pytest tests/unit

Alternatively, you can run them using VSCode Tasks. Open the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) and type Tasks: Run Task. Select Python: Tests - Unit or Python: Tests - Code Coverage from the list.

You can run the integration tests under the tests/integration folder.

    cd python
    poetry install
    poetry run pytest tests/integration

You can also run all the tests together under the tests folder.

    cd python
    poetry install
    poetry run pytest tests

Alternatively, you can run them using VSCode Tasks. Open the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) and type Tasks: Run Task. Select Python: Tests - All from the list.

It's important to note that most of this library is written with asynchronous in mind. The developer should always assume everything is asynchronous. One can use the function signature with either async def or def to understand if something is asynchronous or not.

Pydantic Documentation

This section describes how one can enable serialization for their class using Pydantic.

Let's take the following example:

class A:
    def __init__(self, a: int, b: float, c: List[float], d: dict[str, tuple[float, str]] = {}):
        self.a = a
        self.b = b
        self.c = c
        self.d = d

You would convert this to a Pydantic class by subclassing from the KernelBaseModel class.

from pydantic import Field
from semantic_kernel.kernel_pydantic import KernelBaseModel

class A(KernelBaseModel):
    # The notation for the fields is similar to dataclasses.
    a: int
    b: float
    c: list[float]
    # Only, instead of using dataclasses.field, you would use pydantic.Field
    d: dict[str, tuple[float, str]] = Field(default_factory=dict)

Let's take the following example:

from typing import TypeVar

T1 = TypeVar("T1")
T2 = TypeVar("T2", bound=<some class>)

class A:
    def __init__(a: int, b: T1, c: T2):
        self.a = a
        self.b = b
        self.c = c

You can use the KernelBaseModel to convert these to pydantic serializable classes.

from typing import Generic

from semantic_kernel.kernel_pydantic import KernelBaseModel

class A(KernelBaseModel, Generic[T1, T2]):
    # T1 and T2 must be specified in the Generic argument otherwise, pydantic will
    # NOT be able to serialize this class
    a: int
    b: T1
    c: T2

To run the same checks that run during the GitHub Action build, you can use this command, from the python folder:

    poetry run pre-commit run -a

or use the following task (using Ctrl+Shift+P):

• Python - Run Checks to run the checks on the whole project.
• Python - Run Checks - Staged to run the checks on the currently staged files only.

Ideally you should run these checks before committing any changes, use poetry run pre-commit install to set that up.

We try to maintain a high code coverage for the project. To run the code coverage on the unit tests, you can use the following command:

    cd python
    poetry run pytest --cov=semantic_kernel --cov-report=term-missing:skip-covered tests/unit/

or use the following task (using Ctrl+Shift+P):

• Python: Tests - Code Coverage to run the code coverage on the whole project.

This will show you which files are not covered by the tests, including the specific lines not covered.

There are many people committing to Semantic Kernel, so it is important to keep your local repository up to date. To do this, you can run the following commands:

    git fetch upstream main
    git rebase upstream/main
    git push --force-with-lease

or:

    git fetch upstream main
    git merge upstream/main
    git push

This is assuming the upstream branch refers to the main repository. If you have a different name for the upstream branch, you can replace upstream with the name of your upstream branch.

After running the rebase command, you may need to resolve any conflicts that arise. If you are unsure how to resolve a conflict, please refer to the GitHub's documentation on resolving conflicts, or for VSCode.