Contributor’s Guide

Contributions are always welcome and greatly appreciated!

Code contributions

We love pull requests from everyone! Here’s a quick guide to improve the code:

  1. Fork the repository and clone the fork.

  2. Create a virtual environment using your tool of choice (e.g. virtualenv, conda, etc).

  3. Install development dependencies:

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

  1. Make sure all tests pass:

invoke test

  1. Start making your changes to the master branch (or branch off of it).

  2. Make sure all tests still pass:

invoke test

  1. Check there are no linter errors:

invoke lint

  1. Add yourself to AUTHORS.rst.

  2. Commit your changes and push your branch to GitHub.

  3. Create a pull request through the GitHub website.

During development, use pyinvoke tasks on the command prompt to ease recurring operations:

  • invoke clean: Clean all generated artifacts.

  • invoke check: Run various code and documentation style checks.

  • invoke docs: Generate documentation.

  • invoke lint: Run code linter for coding style checks.

  • invoke test: Run all tests and checks in one swift command.

  • invoke: Show available tasks.

Documentation improvements

We could always use more documentation, whether as part of the introduction/examples/usage documentation or API documentation in docstrings.

Documentation is written in reStructuredText and use Sphinx with numpy-style docstrings to generate the HTML output.

Once you made the documentation changes locally, run the documentation generation:

invoke docs

Bug reports

When reporting a bug please include:

  • Operating system name and version.

  • Python version.

  • Any details about your local setup that might be helpful in troubleshooting.

  • Detailed steps to reproduce the bug.

Feature requests and feedback

The best way to send feedback is to file an issue on Github. If you are proposing a feature:

  • Explain in detail how it would work.

  • Keep the scope as narrow as possible, to make it easier to implement.

A Note on Architecture for Backend Clients

To maintain consistency from one backend client to another and to promote modularity, we make use of several interfaces. Please reference Note on Architecture for more details on how to add or amend a backend client.

Design documents