Contributing code

If you wish to contribute a fix or feature to this project, please follow the following guidelines.

When you make a pull request against the main codebase, Github runs the test suite against your modified code. Before making a pull request, you should ensure that the modified code passes tests locally. To that end, the use of tox is recommended. To run the checks in all environments in parallel, invoke tox with tox -p.

To build the documentation, run tox -e docs after which you can find the generated HTML documentation in build/sphinx.

This project uses pre-commit to perform several code style/quality checks. It is recommended to activate pre-commit on your local clone of the repository (using pre-commit install) to ensure that your changes will pass the same checks on GitHub.

Making a pull request on Github

To get your changes merged to the main codebase, you need a Github account.

  1. Fork the repository (if you don’t have your own fork of it yet) by navigating to the project’s Github repository and clicking on “Fork” near the top right corner.

  2. Clone the forked repository to your local machine with git clone <url> (find the url in the leftmost tab (Code) in GitHub by clicking the green Code button near the top center.

  3. Create a branch for your pull request, like git checkout -b myfixname

  4. Make the desired changes to the code base.

  5. Commit your changes locally. If your changes close an existing issue, add the text Fixes XXX. or Closes XXX. to the commit message (where XXX is the issue number).

  6. Push the changeset(s) to your forked repository (git push)

  7. Navigate to Pull requests page on the original repository (not your fork) and click “New pull request”

  8. Click on the text “compare across forks”.

  9. Select your own fork as the head repository and then select the correct branch name.

  10. Click on “Create pull request”.

If you have trouble, consult the pull request making guide on opensource.com.