Developer Docs

For people who want to build Serpent locally or become contributors: setup, architecture, testing, packaging, and how to participate. These pages ship on main. They are not the slice logs or internal specs in docs/internal/.

Developer documentation is split into two parts.

Part 1: Software development

For developers working on Serpent itself: architecture, building from source, testing.

• Setup — dependencies, first build, development environment
• Build & packaging — package / make / release pipeline / signing
• Architecture — process model, directory layout, key design
• Testing — test layers and how to run them
• Adding media format support — registry, import, preview, filters, protocols, and acceptance
• Branches and workflow — branching strategy, open source contribution process, and maintainer workflow discipline
• Contributing guide — open source collaboration, Pull Requests, and code gate requirements
• Contributors — contributions accepted and merged into the project

Other software docs (internal records live on the repo dev branch and are not published to the site):

• Development process — slice workflow and quality gates
• Domain model / Glossary
• Architecture decision records — ADR-0000 onward
• Implementation specs — slice specs

Part 2: Extension development

For developers writing plugins, scripts or MCP adapters. No software-architecture knowledge required — go straight to the extension author manual:

• Plugin development guide + best practices + API reference
• Plugin distribution and updates
• Official plugin reference implementations:
  • Serpent-Plugin-Renamer — Unrestricted mode (unrestricted), batch asset renaming and real-time diff preview built on standard host dialogs and list controls
  • Serpent-Plugin-MediaConverter — Media transcoding and compression extension demonstrating multi-profile media plans, background job queue lifecycle, and universal package distribution (any)
  • Serpent-Plugin-ImageUpscaler — Unrestricted mode (unrestricted), external AI inference binary orchestration, platform-specific packaging (darwin-arm64 / win32-x64), and chunked content streaming
• Script development guide + API reference
• MCP development guide + API reference

End users: see Using plugins, Browser extension, and Automation.