Develop locally with the devcontainer

The standardised local development environment for PandABlocks-FPGA is the devcontainer defined in this repository (.devcontainer/devcontainer.json and the top-level Dockerfile). Opening the repo in VS Code (or any devcontainer-compatible tool) gives you a consistent build, test, and documentation environment.

For FPGA builds, mount your Vivado installation into the container — see the commented bind-mount example in .devcontainer/devcontainer.json and Build an FPGA image.

Using the Pandablocks Container¶

A pandablocks-dev-container image is published on the GitHub Container Registry for your development needs.

Pull it:

docker pull ghcr.io/pandablocks/pandablocks-dev-container:latest

Use a numbered tag instead of latest to pin a specific release.

Create three host directories:

• REPO_DIR — containing all PandA repositories

• VIVADO_DIR — containing a Vivado installation

• BUILD_DIR — an empty scratch directory

Run the container with those directories mounted:

docker run --rm --net=host -it \
  -v REPO_DIR:/repos:Z \
  -v BUILD_DIR:/build:Z \
  -v VIVADO_DIR:/scratch/Xilinx \
  ghcr.io/pandablocks/pandablocks-dev-container /bin/bash

In each repository inside the container:

cp CONFIG.example CONFIG

Using the Python client from a local session¶

When developing locally you can talk to a running PandA using the Python client’s BlockingClient.