Development Workflow

If you want to make changes to Lean itself, start by building Lean from a clean checkout to make sure that everything is set up correctly. After that, read on below to find out how to set up your editor for changing the Lean source code, followed by further sections of the development manual where applicable such as on the test suite and commit convention.

If you are planning to make any changes that may affect the compilation of Lean itself, e.g. changes to the parser, elaborator, or compiler, you should first read about the bootstrapping pipeline. You should not edit the stage0 directory except using the commands described in that section when necessary.

Development Setup

You can use any of the supported editors for editing the Lean source code. If you set up elan as below, opening src/ as a workspace folder should ensure that stage 0 (i.e. the stage that first compiles src/) will be used for files in that directory.

Dev setup using elan

You can use elan to easily switch between stages and build configurations based on the current directory, both for the lean, leanc, and leanmake binaries in your shell's PATH and inside your editor.

To install elan, you can do so, without installing a default version of Lean, using (Unix)

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/leanprover/elan/master/elan-init.sh -sSf | sh -s -- --default-toolchain none

or (Windows)

curl -O --location https://raw.githubusercontent.com/leanprover/elan/master/elan-init.ps1
powershell -f elan-init.ps1 --default-toolchain none
del elan-init.ps1

The lean-toolchain files in the Lean 4 repository are set up to use the lean4-stage0 toolchain for editing files in src and the lean4 toolchain for editing files in tests.

Run the following commands to make lean4 point at stage1 and lean4-stage0 point at stage0:

# in the Lean rootdir
elan toolchain link lean4 build/release/stage1
elan toolchain link lean4-stage0 build/release/stage0

You can also use the +toolchain shorthand (e.g. lean +lean4-debug) to switch toolchains on the spot. lean4-mode will automatically use the lean executable associated with the directory of the current file as long as lean4-rootdir is unset and ~/.elan/bin is in your exec-path. Where Emacs sources the exec-path from can be a bit unclear depending on your configuration, so alternatively you can also set lean4-rootdir to "~/.elan" explicitly.

You might find that debugging through elan, e.g. via gdb lean, disables some things like symbol autocompletion because at first only the elan proxy binary is loaded. You can instead pass the explicit path to bin/lean in your build folder to gdb, or use gdb $(elan which lean).

It is also possible to generate releases that others can use, simply by pushing a tag to your fork of the Lean 4 github repository (and waiting about an hour; check the Actions tab for completion). If you push my-tag to a fork in your github account my_name, you can then put my_name/lean4:my-tag in your lean-toolchain file in a project using lake. (You must use a tag name that does not start with a numeral, or contain _).

VS Code

There is a lean.code-workspace file that correctly sets up VS Code with workspace roots for the stage0/stage1 setup described above as well as with other settings. You should always load it when working on Lean, such as by invoking

code lean.code-workspace

on the command line.

ccache

Lean's build process uses ccache if it is installed to speed up recompilation of the generated C code. Without ccache, you'll likely spend more time than necessary waiting on rebuilds - it's a good idea to make sure it's installed.

prelude

Unlike most Lean projects, all submodules of the Lean module begin with the prelude keyword. This disables the automated import of Init, meaning that developers need to figure out their own subset of Init to import. This is done such that changing files in Init doesn't force a full rebuild of Lean.