Contributing to Serena

Serena is under active development. We are just discovering what it can do and where the limitations lie.

Feel free to share your learnings by opening new issues, feature requests and extensions.

Developer Environment Setup

You can have a local setup via uv or a docker interpreter-based setup. The repository is also configured to seamlessly work within a GitHub Codespace. See the instructions for the various setup scenarios below.

Independently of how the setup was done, the virtual environment can be created and activated via uv (see below), and the various tasks like formatting, testing, and documentation building can be executed using poe. For example, poe format will format the code, including the notebooks. Just run poe to see the available commands.

Python (uv) setup

You can install a virtual environment with the required as follows

Create a new virtual environment: uv venv
Activate the environment:
- On Linux/Unix/macOS or Windows with Git Bash: source .venv/bin/activate
- On Windows outside of Git Bash: .venv\Scripts\activate.bat (in cmd/ps) or source .venv/Scripts/activate (in git-bash)
Install the required packages with all extras: uv pip install --all-extras -r pyproject.toml -e .

Running Tools Locally

The Serena tools (and in fact all Serena code) can be executed without an LLM, and also without any MCP specifics (though you can use the mcp inspector, if you want).

An example script for running tools is provided in scripts/demo_run_tools.py.

Adding a New Supported Language

See the corresponding memory.