Here is a short checklist of what we strive for in a well-formed code contribution:
- Commit log is clean and devoid of "debugging" types of commits
- Entry into
CHANGELOG.md
with(credit: @username)
(see Changelog below) - Pull request is associated with at least 1 issue
- Virtualenv files are not included in the commit log
Do your best to check as many of these boxes as you can and everything will be fine!
Any bugs you find, features you want to request, or questions you have should go in the repository's [issues section]({REPO ISSUE LINK HERE}). Please, be kind and search through both open and closed issues to make sure your question or bug report hasn't already been posted and resolved.
{Add information here for setting up a local version of the project}
This project is expected to have automated test coverage, so be sure to check that tests are passing before you begin development. Our emphasis is on stability here, so if tests aren't passing, that's a bug.
As noted before, make sure tests are passing before starting. If you have difficulty getting to that stable, initial state, reach out by opening an issue (see Issues above). This is considered a failure by the maintainers if instructions are less than absolutely clear. Feedback is very helpful here!
Tests are written using pytest
for a variety of reasons. Some of which are:
- easy assertions that an exception will be thrown and the message it contains
- skipping some tests for stated reasons
- marking some tests as expected to fail
- colorized output compared to
unittest
We should be able to invoke the full test suite by calling either python setup.py test
or
pytest
from the terminal.
The test suite should run quickly at the moment, but that won't always be the case. Running
individual tests with pytest path/to/test/file.py
is also acceptable while actively
developing.
NOTE: a pull request should always have a fully passing test suite.
If you're unfamiliar with the process, see Github's helpful documentation on creating pull requests.
We try to keep parity of at least one issue in each pull request. This is so we can discuss the big-picture plans in the issue, preferrably before actual development begins. This helps keep wasted time to a minimum.
Sometimes there are changes that are unfinished, but require periodic feedback--which is recommended
for large changes. If this is the case, add [WIP]
to the start of the title of the pull request
when opening it, or edit the existing pull request title to include it. For example:
TITLE: [WIP] Convert from Redis to Cassandra
Some description here
- [ ] To do list item
- [ ] Other to do list item
- [x] Completed to do list item
I'm looking for feedback on what I've added so far.
We follow the practices defined on Keep A Changelog, keeping our
changelog in CHANGELOG.md
The gist of it is:
- Add line items with a short summary of changes to
CHANGELOG.md
under theUNRELEASED
section as they are created - Add
(credit: @your_username)
at the end of each line item added - (When releasing a new version) Replace
UNRELEASED
section title with the version number of the release, then create a new header above it namedUNRELEASED