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How to Contribute

Contributions of all kinds are welcome! Get in touch if you ...

  • ... found a bug.
  • ... have a question on how to use the code.
  • ... have a suggestion, on how to improve the code or documentation.
  • ... would like to get involved in writing code or documentation.
  • ... have some other thoughts or suggestions.

Please, feel free to file an issue in the Issues section on GitHub for this. Also, have a look at the text below if you want to get involved in the development.

General Guidlines

For the coding bit of the project we try to follow these general guidelines:

The current setup uses:

  • pytest ... for testing.
  • pylint ... for code style checks.
  • sphinx ... for generating the documentation.
  • tox ... for testing with different environments.
  • travis ... for continuous integration.

How to contribute to the code or documentation

Please use the Issues and Pull requests system on github.

If you are familiar with the process of contributing to an open source project please make sure you tick all (or most) appropriate boxes in PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md before submitting a pull request.

If you haven't done this sort of thing before, this link (https://egghead.io/courses/how-to-contribute-to-an-open-source-project-on-github) is a nice and compact tutorial on how to contribute to OpenSource projects with Pull requests. Also, there is a detailed description on how to contribute to this project below.

Overview:

  1. Discuss the issue in the Issue section
  2. Create a fork of this repository on Github
  3. Setup your local environment
  4. Clone your fork to your local machine
  5. Create a new branch pr/topic-name
  6. Make your changes and tick the boxes
  7. Check your code: run tests
  8. Tidy up: Rebase and squash
  9. Create a pull request
  10. Make changes to your pull request

1. Discuss the issue in the Issue section

There are multiple ways of contributing to project, for example:

  • Pointing out a bug or a typo,
  • Suggesting an improvement on the API or backend,
  • Suggesting new features,
  • Extending the documentation or tutorials,
  • Contributing bugfixes,
  • Contributing code to improve the API or backend,
  • or, simply sharing general thoughts on the package.

To ensure that your contribution has the best effect on the package it is vital to discuss them first. Communication is essential to make sure your contribution fits to the goals of the project.

Go to the Issue section and file an issue to share your thoughts. Ideally you discuss your plans with others (particularly a maintainer) before you invest any significant amount of time to avoid overlap or conflicts with other contributions. This is essential to ensure that your work fits well into the project.

2. Create a fork of this repository on Github

If you have discussed your plans in the Issue section and would like to make a direct contribution to the code or documentation, you will need to create a fork of the repository on your github account. This creates a linked copy on your account which you can modify to your liking. You can then create a pull request to suggest your changes to this project.

3. Clone your fork to your local machine

Next, you will need to clone to your fork to your local machine and add the original repository as a remote resource. After initialising a new repository in an empty directory with git init:

$ #if you use ssh:
$ git remote add upstream git@github.com:tempoCollaboration/OQuPy.git

$ git fetch upstream
$ git checkout main

With this, if there is a change to the original repository, you can bring your fork up to date by pulling from the upstream remote repository (the original repository) and pushing to the origin remote repository (your fork).

$ git checkout main
$ git pull upstream main
$ git push origin main

4. Setup your local environment

As a development environment you will need git, python3.10, pip3 and tox installed.

You need git to pull, commit and push changes to the repository, while tox allows you to run tests on the package in an virtual environment (to avoid that the result of the tests depends on the local setup). If you are unfamiliar with git, this is a good place to start learning about it. Currently the code is tested against python3.10, which makes it necessary to have this version of the python interpreter installed in the development environment.

You may wish to create a virtual environment dedicated to the development of this package with conda or venv to avoid interference with other applications.

Finally, install the required python package dependencies with (executed in the repositories main directory):

$ python3 -m pip install -r requirements_ci.txt

5. Create a new branch pr/topic-name

To group together all the changes you make, you should create a new temporary branch. We suggest to use a name of the form pr/topic-name for this branch. For example,

$ git checkout main
$ git checkout -b pr/add-documentation-to-dynamics
$ git push --set-upstream origin pr/add-documentation-to-dynamics

6. Make your changes and tick the boxes

Now, you are all set to make your changes in modify-add-commit cycles and push them to your fork.

Later, when you create the pull request (section 9) these changes will be reviewed by a maintainer who will check all necessary boxes in PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md to guarantee the quality of the package. Therefore, during the process of creating your changes, it is advisable to occasionally compare your work against this list and periodically run the automated tests (see section 7). This checklist is there to help all contributors to produce high quality code, not to deter you from contributing.

7. Check your code: run tests

Three of the boxes in PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md are checked automatically when new commits are added to the project, namely:

  • execute the tests that check the functionality of the package (with pytest)
  • test the coding style (with pylint)

7.1 test all

You can run all three tests by simply running tox in your local clone of the repository:

$ tox

This performs a bunch of tests. If they all pass, it will finish with something like:

  pytest: OK (136.95=setup[30.37]+cmd[106.58] seconds)
  pylint: OK (51.52=setup[25.93]+cmd[25.59] seconds)
  congratulations :) (188.56 seconds)

7.2 test pytest only

You can run the pytests on python3.10 with:

$ tox -e pytest

or you can pick a specific test in ./tests to run with:

$ tox -e pytest coverage/api_test.py

Here coverage/api_test.py is the path of the test file relative to the tests directory and the command must be run from the base directory of the repository.

7.3 test pylint only

This checks the code code style with pylint:

$ tox -e pylint

or you can check the style of a specific file in ./oqupy with:

$ tox -e pylint base_api.py

where base_api.py is the path of the file relative to the oqupy directory and again this command must be run from the base directory of the repository. [comment]: # (The reason for this is that tox prepends the path you pass as an argument with './oqupy/' when using the style command, and './tests/' when using the py36 command)

7.4 build the documentation

This invokes a sphinx-build to build the HTML documentation

$ tox -e docs

You can view the generated documentation by opening it in a browser:

$ firefox ./docs/_build/html/index.html &

8. Tidy up: squash and rebase

A typical development process involves a lot of bugfixes and repeated redesigning of the code. Although it is good practice to capture every step of the process in its own commit it can clutter the commit history make it hard to follow. Therefore, once you think your contribution is ready for sharing, it is probably appreciated by your peers and the maintainers if you tidy up (squash) the commit history of your code contribution. Also, in case that there have been other code contributions since you created the pull request branch, rebasing the branch can help avoiding merge conflicts later. Both, squashing and rebasing can be performed with the command git rebase -i ... and are described here. This command is destructive (i.e. it is possible to lose information), and therefore you should create a local backup before using it. However, if you are unsure, feel free to skip this tidying up process. We ask that you try to write git messages that are concise and descriptive and follow the standard format of a first line not exceeding 50 characters followed optionally by further lines providing additional details.

9. Create a pull requests

You can now create a pull request. This request will then be reviewed by a maintainer who will check all neccessary boxes in PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md to guarantee the quality of the package. Therefore, before you submit the pull request, go through this checklist once more. However, this list is there to help all contributors to produce high quality code, not to deter you from contributing. If you can't tick some of the boxes, feel free to submit the pull request anyway and report about it in the pull request message.

10. Make changes to your pull request

You should find the pull request you created in section 9 on the pull request page. All the rest of the communication will happen there.

You can expect to hear back from a maintainer within one to two weeks. If your contribution checks all the boxes in PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md](https://github.com/tempoCollaboration/OQuPy/blob/main/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md) the maintainer will merge your changes into the project. If some aspects of the contribution need to be changed, the maintainer might ask you if you'd be willing to perform these changes. In this case you can simply make further changes to your pull request branch and push them to your fork. This will automatically update your pull request, and therefore you need not create a one.

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