Installation

Pyinstaller builds

In order to simplify distribution, you can find packaged one-file builds created with Pyinstaller via GitHub Actions on the releases page. If you just want to use pyJSON without looking into the code or dealing with Python, the prebuilt files are the better choice. Note that Pyinstaller builds are not extensively tested. If you encounter unusual behaviour, please open an issue.

Working with the code

In order to use pyJSON, at least Python 3.10 is required, alongside a few third-party modules.

Warning

Due to match cases being used in several parts, pyJSON is explicitly not compatible with versions prior to python 3.10! See PEP 636 for details.

Currently, in order to use pyJSON, it is necessary to download the source code. Either use

git clone https://github.com/nplathe/pyJSON-Schema-Loader-and-JSON-Editor

or use the “Code” -> “Download ZIP” button on the repository page to download the source code.

For running pyJSON, the following packages are needed:

package	version	purpose
jsonschema	~=4.19.2	JSON validation via JSON schema
PySide6	~=6.5.1.1	python bindings for the QT framework
regex	~=2023.10.3	regular expressions

Prerequisites

It is highly recommended to create a virtual environment for installation and building an executable. Virtual environments keep your main installation free from unneeded packages and introduce a separation of the several packages used, which heavily benefits development and avoids unnecessary issues, e.g. package conflicts.

A: installing packages via pip

In order to run pyJSON, run the following command in the repository directory to install the dependencies.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Warning

As of PEP 668, if your base environment is marked as externally managed, you must use a virtual environment.

B: conda managed environment

conda is an alternative package manager for python. It is capable of creating and managing several sources for packages, creating virtual environments and solving dependencies for packages.

First create a new virtual environment and enter it.

conda create -n <yourenvname> python=3.10.9
conda activate <yourenvname>

You can always leave your environment with conda deactivate.

Install the dependencies. Note, that, dependent on your settings and distribution of the conda package manager, you might have to specify the channel with the -c argument, e.g. -c conda-forge for the community-driven conda-forge repository, which contains all of the needed packages.

conda install -c conda-forge jsonschema regex pyside6

Building the documentation

If you are interested in building the documentation yourself, you need the following packages:

package	version	purpose
sphinx	~=7.7.7	documentation generation framework
myst-parser	~=3.0.1	Markdown parser for sphinx
furo	~=2024.5.6	alternative HTML theme for sphinx

Running pyJSON

In your python environment in the command line, after installing the prerequisites, navigate to the directory pyJSON is located in and execute

python pyJSON.py

Building a distributable package

First, install PyInstaller into your environment. Make sure to activate your environment, then navigate to the source directory and run

pyinstaller --clean --icon=icon.ico ./pyJSON.py

to generate a distributable frozen environment containing everything for pyJSON in order to run it without a local python installation. You can add the --onefile parameter to create an one-file executable instead of a directory tree.