Contributing¶

Coordinate First¶

Before you create a pull request, please create a new issue first to coordinate.

It might be that we are already working on the same or similar feature, but we haven’t made our work visible yet.

Create a Development Environment¶

We usually develop in a virtual environment. To create one, change to the root directory of the repository and invoke:

python -m venv venv

You need to activate it. On nix (Linux, Mac, *etc.):

source venv/bin/activate

and on Windows:

venv\Scripts\activate

Install Development Dependencies¶

Once you activated the virtual environment, you can install the development dependencies using pip:

pip3 install --editable .[dev]

The –editable option is necessary so that all the changes made to the repository are automatically reflected in the virtual environment (see also this StackOverflow question).

Pre-commit Checks¶

We provide a battery of pre-commit checks to make the code uniform and consistent across the code base.

We use black to format the code and use the default maximum line length of 88 characters.

The docstrings need to conform to PEP 257. We use Sphinx docstring format to mark special fields (such as function arguments, return values etc.). Please annotate your function with type annotations instead of writing the types in the docstring.

To run all pre-commit checks, run from the root directory:

python precommit.py

You can automatically re-format the code with:

python precommit.py --overwrite

Here is the full manual of the pre-commit script:

usage: precommit.py [-h] [--overwrite] [--select  [...]] [--skip  [...]]

Run pre-commit checks on the repository.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help        show this help message and exit
  --overwrite       Try to automatically fix the offending files (e.g., by re-
                    formatting).
  --select  [ ...]  If set, only the selected steps are executed. This is
                    practical if some of the steps failed and you want to fix
                    them in isolation. The steps are given as a space-
                    separated list of: black mypy pylint pydocstyle test
                    doctest check-init-and-setup-coincide check-help-in-doc
  --skip  [ ...]    If set, skips the specified steps. This is practical if
                    some of the steps passed and you want to fix the remainder
                    in isolation. The steps are given as a space-separated
                    list of: black mypy pylint pydocstyle test doctest check-
                    init-and-setup-coincide check-help-in-doc

The pre-commit script also runs as part of our continuous integration pipeline.

Write Commit Message¶

We follow Chris Beams’ guidelines on commit messages:

Separate subject from body with a blank line
Limit the subject line to 50 characters
Capitalize the subject line
Do not end the subject line with a period
Use the imperative mood in the subject line
Wrap the body at 72 characters
Use the body to explain what and why vs. how