Thanks for considering contributing! Please read this document to learn the various ways you can contribute to this project and how to go about doing it.
First, do a quick search to see whether your issue has already been reported. If your issue has already been reported, please comment on the existing issue.
Otherwise, open a new GitHub issue. Be sure to include a clear title and description. The description should include as much relevant information as possible. The description should explain how to reproduce the erroneous behavior as well as the behavior you expect to see. Ideally you would include a code sample or an executable test case demonstrating the expected behavior.
We use GitHub issues to track feature requests. Before you create a feature request:
- Make sure you have a clear idea of the enhancement you would like. If you have a vague idea, consider discussing it first on a GitHub issue.
- Check the documentation to make sure your feature does not already exist.
- Do a quick search to see whether your feature has already been suggested.
When creating your request, please:
- Provide a clear title and description.
- Explain why the enhancement would be useful. It may be helpful to highlight the feature in other libraries.
- Include code examples to demonstrate how the enhancement would be used.
When you're ready to contribute code to address an open issue, please follow these guidelines to help us be able to review your pull request (PR) quickly.
-
Initial setup (only do this once)
Expand details 👇
If you haven't already done so, please fork this repository on GitHub.
Then clone your fork locally with
git clone https://github.com/USERNAME/vironomy.git
or
git clone git@github.com:USERNAME/vironomy.git
At this point the local clone of your fork only knows that it came from your repo, github.com/USERNAME/vironomy.git, but doesn't know anything the main repo, https://github.com/b-tierney/vironomy.git. You can see this by running
git remote -v
which will output something like this:
origin https://github.com/USERNAME/vironomy.git (fetch) origin https://github.com/USERNAME/vironomy.git (push)
This means that your local clone can only track changes from your fork, but not from the main repo, and so you won't be able to keep your fork up-to-date with the main repo over time. Therefore you'll need to add another "remote" to your clone that points to https://github.com/b-tierney/vironomy.git. To do this, run the following:
git remote add upstream https://github.com/b-tierney/vironomy.git
Now if you do
git remote -v
again, you'll seeorigin https://github.com/USERNAME/vironomy.git (fetch) origin https://github.com/USERNAME/vironomy.git (push) upstream https://github.com/b-tierney/vironomy.git (fetch) upstream https://github.com/b-tierney/vironomy.git (push)
Finally, you'll need to create a Python 3 virtual environment suitable for working on this project. There a number of tools out there that making working with virtual environments easier. The most direct way is with the
venv
module in the standard library, but if you're new to Python or you don't already have a recent Python 3 version installed on your machine, we recommend Miniconda.On Mac, for example, you can install Miniconda with Homebrew:
brew install miniconda
Then you can create and activate a new Python environment by running:
conda create -n vironomy python=3.9 conda activate vironomy
Once your virtual environment is activated, you can install your local clone in "editable mode" with
pip install -U pip setuptools wheel pip install -e .[dev]
The "editable mode" comes from the
-e
argument topip
, and essential just creates a symbolic link from the site-packages directory of your virtual environment to the source code in your local clone. That way any changes you make will be immediately reflected in your virtual environment. -
Ensure your fork is up-to-date
Expand details 👇
Once you've added an "upstream" remote pointing to https://github.com/allenai/python-package-temlate.git, keeping your fork up-to-date is easy:
git checkout main # if not already on main git pull --rebase upstream main git push
-
Create a new branch to work on your fix or enhancement
Expand details 👇
Committing directly to the main branch of your fork is not recommended. It will be easier to keep your fork clean if you work on a separate branch for each contribution you intend to make.
You can create a new branch with
# replace BRANCH with whatever name you want to give it git checkout -b BRANCH git push -u origin BRANCH
-
Test your changes
Expand details 👇
Our continuous integration (CI) testing runs a number of checks for each pull request on GitHub Actions. You can run most of these tests locally, which is something you should do before opening a PR to help speed up the review process and make it easier for us.
First, you should run
isort
andblack
to make sure you code is formatted consistently. Many IDEs support code formatters as plugins, so you may be able to setup isort and black to run automatically everytime you save. For example,black.vim
will give you this functionality in Vim. But bothisort
andblack
are also easy to run directly from the command line. Just run this from the root of your clone:isort . black .
Our CI also uses
flake8
to lint the code base andmypy
for type-checking. You should run both of these next withflake8 .
and
mypy .
We also strive to maintain high test coverage, so most contributions should include additions to the unit tests. These tests are run with
pytest
, which you can use to locally run any test modules that you've added or changed.For example, if you've fixed a bug in
vironomy/a/b.py
, you can run the tests specific to that module withpytest -v tests/a/b_test.py
To check the code coverage locally in this example, you could run
pytest -v --cov vironomy.a.b tests/a/b_test.py
If your contribution involves additions to any public part of the API, we require that you write docstrings for each function, method, class, or module that you add. See the Writing docstrings section below for details on the syntax. You should test to make sure the API documentation can build without errors by running
make docs
If the build fails, it's most likely due to small formatting issues. If the error message isn't clear, feel free to comment on this in your pull request.
And finally, please update the CHANGELOG with notes on your contribution in the "Unreleased" section at the top.
After all of the above checks have passed, you can now open a new GitHub pull request. Make sure you have a clear description of the problem and the solution, and include a link to relevant issues.
We look forward to reviewing your PR!
We use Sphinx to build our API docs, which automatically parses all docstrings of public classes and methods using the autodoc extension. Please refer to autoc's documentation to learn about the docstring syntax.