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 open new issues, feature requests and extensions.
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.
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:
source .venv/bin/activate - On Windows:
.venv\Scripts\activate.bat(in cmd/ps) orsource .venv/Scripts/activate(in git-bash)
- On Linux/Unix/macOS:
- Install the required packages with all extras:
uv pip install --all-extras -r pyproject.toml -e .
Build the docker image with
docker build -t serena .and run it with the repository mounted as a volume:
docker run -it --rm -v "$(pwd)":/workspace serenaYou can also just run bash docker_build_and_run.sh, which will do both things
for you.
Note: For the Windows subsystem for Linux (WSL), you may need to adjust the path for the volume.
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.
Serena interacts with code through language servers which are included in
the solidlsp package. It is rather easy to include a new supported language
if an LSP implementation for it exists. You just need to:
- create a new subclass of
SolidLanguageServer - add a new value to the
Languageenum - make a new
elifcase in theSolidLanguageServer.createmethod - add a test repo of the new language to
test/resources/repos/<new_language>/test_repoand new tests intest/solidlsp/<new_language>. Similar to existing tests for other languages - also add a new case to the parameterized tests in
test/serena/test_serena_agent
The subclasses are typically easy to write, have a look at the PyrightLanguageServer for an example, or at any other implementation to see how non-python dependencies for language servers are handled there. There are also some tips from the multilspy admin here.