[Feature] PGM Meet-up 2025-05-21 Hackathons

[mgovers]

This is the parent issue for the Hackathons planned for the 2025-05-21 PGM meet-up.

Please register via the event page if you are interested in joining. While most of the hackathon topics will be in-person only, we will facilitate some topics that can be attended remotely.

Contribution to PGM

Prerequisites

• A GitHub account
• Git with the correct username and e-mail set up (see also https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/git-basics/setting-your-username-in-git#setting-your-git-username-for-every-repository-on-your-computer)

Setup

• Create a personal fork of the power-grid-model
  • Select one person who will create the fork with a GitHub account
  • Go to the repository home page
  • Create the fork using the Fork button.
    
• Go to the fork you just created and clone/checkout the repository in your development environment (see also https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/creating-and-managing-repositories/cloning-a-repository).
• Create a development branch in your own development environment and open the project in your favorite IDE. We recommend a branch name like hackathon-2025/your-hackathon-topic
  • If you use Visual Studio Code, you may want to install the recommended extensions for an optimal experience.*
  • Recommended: try to set-up pre-commit and install it using pre-commit --install in your local git repository. This will help you pass CI by doing things like formatting for you.

C++ topics

Prerequisites

Please try to set this up before the meet-up starts. If you encounter any issues: no worries, please comment on this issue and we can try to resolve it remotely. Otherwise, we can see what we can do during the meet-up.

• Basic C++ knowledge
• A laptop (or other development environment) with sufficient permissions and/or admin rights with a supported architecture. An example setup is available for Windows, Ubuntu/Debian or macOS (see below).
• A working and recent version of one of the major compilers (GCC, Clang, MSVC, Clang-CL or XCode/Apple Clang; see also the compiler support documentation for supported versions)
• A recent CMake version (>= 3.23) and Ninja
  • Visual Studio / Visual Studio Build Tools users can also install these using the Visual Studio installer.
• The C++ build dependencies
  • It is recommended to follow the example set-ups for Ubuntu, Windows or macOS, respectively.
  • Otherwise, please try to set up the C++ build dependencies yourself.

Setup

• Build the CMake project and run the tests (see below for tips where needed)
  • Select a build preset of your choice (please note that you use a preset for your selected compiler).
  • Configure, build and install.
  • Run CTest.
• If all tests pass, you are now completely set up! 🚀

Python API topics

Prerequisites

• Python
• Basic Python knowledge

Setup

• Prerequisites for C++ topics is needed for windows systems. (It can be bypassed by a way mentioned below.)
• Navigate to the repository directory, create a virtual environment, and activate it, install package in development mode and run pytest to verify:

cd path/to/power-grid-model
python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate  # source ./.venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .[dev]
pytest

Development with python API without building C++ core.

Following is a way to provide PGM core manually instead of building it locally while installing python package in editable mode.

• Install package using POWER_GRID_MODEL_NO_BINARY_BUILD=1 with this extra environment variable. Rest all commands stay the same. Hence for windows,

set POWER_GRID_MODEL_NO_BINARY_BUILD=1 
pip install -e .[dev]

and for WSL/Linux/mac:

POWER_GRID_MODEL_NO_BINARY_BUILD=1 pip install -e .[dev]

• Download relevant wheel file from https://github.com/PowerGridModel/power-grid-model/releases. Make sure to only use one from trusted place like the official release via PGM's github.
• Extract the PGM core and copy it to the relevant directory, you can use python to do it

python -m zipfile --extract "path_to_wheel_file\pgm_wheel_file_name.whl" "directory\to\extract"

• Copy (\_core\_power_grid_core.so for WSL/linux/mac and \_core\_power_grid_core.dll for windows) from the extracted wheel file into src/power_grid_model/_core.