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Contributing & Help

Welcome to DiMCAT contributor's guide.

This document focuses on getting any potential contributor familiarized with the development processes, but other kinds of contributions are also appreciated.

If you are new to using git or have never collaborated in a project previously, please have a look at contribution-guide.org. Other resources are also listed in the excellent guide created by FreeCodeCamp [1].

Please notice, all users and contributors are expected to be open, considerate, reasonable, and respectful. When in doubt, Python Software Foundation's Code of Conduct is a good reference in terms of behavior guidelines.

Issue Reports

If you experience bugs or general issues with DiMCAT, please have a look on the issue tracker. If you don't see anything useful there, please feel free to fire an issue report.

Tip

Please don't forget to include the closed issues in your search. Sometimes a solution was already reported, and the problem is considered solved.

New issue reports should include information about your programming environment (e.g., operating system, Python version) and steps to reproduce the problem. Please try also to simplify the reproduction steps to a very minimal example that still illustrates the problem you are facing. By removing other factors, you help us to identify the root cause of the issue.

Documentation Improvements

You can help improve DiMCAT docs by making them more readable and coherent, or by adding missing information and correcting mistakes.

DiMCAT documentation uses Sphinx as its main documentation compiler. This means that the docs are kept in the same repository as the project code, and that any documentation update is done in the same way was a code contribution.

Documentation pages are written in reStructuredText (as are the docstrings that are automatically compiled to the API docs) or as [MyST notebooks](https://myst-nb.readthedocs.io/en/latest/authoring/basics.html) that are run and rendered to HTML when building the docs (see also the syntax guide at MyST).

Tip

Please notice that the GitHub web interface provides a quick way of propose changes in DiMCAT's files. While this mechanism can be tricky for normal code contributions, it works perfectly fine for contributing to the docs, and can be quite handy.

If you are interested in trying this method out, please navigate to the docs folder in the source repository, find which file you would like to propose changes and click in the little pencil icon at the top, to open GitHub's code editor. Once you finish editing the file, please write a message in the form at the bottom of the page describing which changes have you made and what are the motivations behind them and submit your proposal.

When working on documentation changes in your local machine, you can compile them using tox:

tox -e docs

and use Python's built-in web server for a preview in your web browser (http://localhost:8000):

python3 -m http.server --directory 'docs/_build/html'

Code Contributions

TL;DR

  • Fork the repository.
  • (Create a virtual environment, :ref:`see below <virtenv>`).
  • Head into the local clone of your fork and hit pip install -e ".[dev]" (where . is the current directory).
  • Install the precommit hooks via pre-commit install.
  • Implement the changes and create a Pull Request against the development branch.
  • Thank you!

Submit an issue

Before you work on any non-trivial code contribution it's best to first create a report in the issue tracker to start a discussion on the subject. This often provides additional considerations and avoids unnecessary work.

Create an environment

Before you start coding, we recommend creating an isolated virtual environment to avoid any problems with your installed Python packages. This can easily be done via either virtualenv:

virtualenv <PATH TO VENV>
source <PATH TO VENV>/bin/activate

or Miniconda:

conda create -n dimcat python=3 six virtualenv pytest pytest-cov
conda activate dimcat

Clone the repository

  1. Create an user account on GitHub if you do not already have one.

  2. Fork the project repository: click on the Fork button near the top of the page. This creates a copy of the code under your account on GitHub.

  3. Clone this copy to your local disk:

    git clone [email protected]:YourLogin/dimcat.git
cd dimcat

  4. You should run:

    pip install -U pip -e ".[dev]"

    to be able to import the package under development in the Python REPL.

  5. Install pre-commit:

    pre-commit install

    DiMCAT comes with a lot of hooks configured to automatically help the developer to check the code being written.

Implement your changes

  1. Create a branch to hold your changes:

    git checkout -b my-feature

    and start making changes. Never work on the main branch!

  2. Start your work on this branch. Don't forget to add docstrings to new functions, modules and classes, especially if they are part of public APIs.

  3. Add yourself to the list of contributors in AUTHORS.rst.

  4. When you’re done editing, do:

    git add <MODIFIED FILES>
git commit

    to record your changes in git.

    Please make sure to see the validation messages from pre-commit and fix any eventual issues. This should automatically use flake8/black to check/fix the code style in a way that is compatible with the project.

    Important

    Don't forget to add unit tests and documentation in case your contribution adds an additional feature and is not just a bugfix.

    Moreover, writing a descriptive commit message is highly recommended. In case of doubt, you can check the commit history with:

    git log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --all

    to look for recurring communication patterns.

  5. Please check that your changes don't break any unit tests with:

    tox

    (after having installed tox with pip install tox or pipx).

    You can also use tox to run several other pre-configured tasks in the repository. Try tox -av to see a list of the available checks.

Submit your contribution

  1. If everything works fine, push your local branch to GitHub with:

    git push -u origin my-feature

  2. Go to the web page of your fork and click "Create pull request" to send your changes for review.

    Find more detailed information in creating a PR. You might also want to open the PR as a draft first and mark it as ready for review after the feedbacks from the continuous integration (CI) system or any required fixes.

DiMCAT architecture

See Developers guide.

Coding Conventions

Please make sure to run pre-commit install in your local clone of the repository. This way, many coding conventions are automatically applied before each commit!

Commit messages

DiMCAT uses Conventional Commits to determine the next SemVer version number. Please make sure to prefix each message with one of:

Commit Type Title Description SemVer
feat Features A new feature MINOR
fix Bug Fixes A bug Fix PATCH
docs Documentation Documentation only changes PATCH
style Styles Changes that do not affect the meaning of the code (white-space, formatting, missing semi-colons, etc) PATCH
refactor Code Refactoring A code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature PATCH
perf Performance Improvements A code change that improves performance PATCH
test Tests Adding missing tests or correcting existing tests PATCH
build Builds Changes that affect the build system or external dependencies (example scopes: gulp, broccoli, npm) PATCH
ci Continuous Integrations Changes to our CI configuration files and scripts (example scopes: Travis, Circle, BrowserStack, SauceLabs) PATCH
chore Chores Other changes that don't modify src or test files PATCH
revert Reverts Reverts a previous commit PATCH

In the case of breaking changes, which result in a new major version, please add a ! after the type, e.g., refactor!:. This type of commit message needs to come with a body, starting with BREAKING CHANGE:, which explains in great detail everything that will not be working anymore.

Internal imports

The top level of the src/dimcat directory consists of the two packages data and steps and a couple of files which, here, we call base.

  • All modules can import from base and data.
  • data modules should not import from steps. Whenever a step is needed, its constructor can be retrieved using :func:`dimcat.base.get_class` function.
  • All modules can import from dimcat.utils except for dimcat.base. Likewise, the base module of any package cannot import from its sibling .utils. This makes it possible to pull up those elements would otherwise be defined in one of the adjacent modules (which generally do import .utils), but which are required by one or several utility functions. For example, the Enum dimcat.data.resources.base.FeatureName, conceptually, belongs into dimcat.data.resources.dc, where the Feature class is defined. However, since dimcat.data.resources.utils.feature_specs2config() needs to import the Enum, it is moved up to dimcat.data.resources.base. Hence, no base module shall ever import from .utils. Any utility functions it requires can go into the utils of its parent -- or dimcat.utils.

Order of module members

  • imports
  • constants
  • one or several groups, enclosed in # region <name> and # endregion <name> comments:
    • classes
    • functions

Order of attributes and methods

Each bullet point represents an alphabetically sorted group of attributes or methods. Private attributes and methods are sorted as if they didn't have a leading underscore.

  • class members
    • class variables
    • @staticmethod
    • @classmethod @property
    • @classmethod
    • nested classes (esp. Schema())
  • instance members
    • __init__()
    • magic methods
    • @property and setters
    • public and private methods

Troubleshooting

The following tips can be used when facing problems to build or test the package:

  1. Make sure to fetch all the tags from the upstream repository. The command git describe --abbrev=0 --tags should return the version you are expecting. If you are trying to run CI scripts in a fork repository, make sure to push all the tags. You can also try to remove all the egg files or the complete egg folder, i.e., .eggs, as well as the *.egg-info folders in the src folder or potentially in the root of your project.

  2. Sometimes tox misses out when new dependencies are added, especially to setup.cfg and docs/requirements.txt. If you find any problems with missing dependencies when running a command with tox, try to recreate the tox environment using the -r flag. For example, instead of:

    tox -e docs

    Try running:

    tox -r -e docs

  3. Make sure to have a reliable tox installation that uses the correct Python version (e.g., 3.7+). When in doubt you can run:

    tox --version
# OR
which tox

    If you have trouble and are seeing weird errors upon running tox, you can also try to create a dedicated virtual environment with a tox binary freshly installed. For example:

    virtualenv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
.venv/bin/pip install tox
.venv/bin/tox -e all

  4. Pytest can drop you in an interactive session in the case an error occurs. In order to do that you need to pass a --pdb option (for example by running tox -- -k <NAME OF THE FALLING TEST> --pdb). You can also setup breakpoints manually instead of using the --pdb option.

Maintainer tasks

Releases

If you are part of the group of maintainers and have correct user permissions on PyPI, the following steps can be used to release a new version for DiMCAT:

  1. Make sure all unit tests are successful.
  2. Tag the current commit on the main branch with a release tag, e.g., v1.2.3.
  3. Push the new tag to the upstream repository, e.g., git push upstream v1.2.3
  4. Clean up the dist and build folders with tox -e clean (or rm -rf dist build) to avoid confusion with old builds and Sphinx docs.
  5. Run tox -e build and check that the files in dist have the correct version (no .dirty or git hash) according to the git tag. Also check the sizes of the distributions, if they are too big (e.g., > 500KB), unwanted clutter may have been accidentally included.
  6. Run tox -e publish -- --repository pypi and check that everything was uploaded to PyPI correctly.
[1]Even though, these resources focus on open source projects and communities, the general ideas behind collaborating with other developers to collectively create software are general and can be applied to all sorts of environments, including private companies and proprietary code bases.