CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

We love contributions! We've compiled this documentation to help you understand our contributing guidelines. If you still have questions, please contact us and we'd be happy to help!

Code of Conduct

Please read CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md before contributing.

Getting started

To start contributing, install the required Python packages, and pre-commit hooks using:

pip install -r requirements.txt
pre-commit install

or the make command:

make requirements

The pre-commit hooks are a security feature to ensure, for example, no secrets¹, and large data files are accidentally committed into the repository. For more information on pre-commit hooks see our documentation.

Code conventions

We mainly follow the GDS Way in our code conventions.

Git and GitHub

We use Git to version control the source code. [Please read the Quality assurance of code for analysis and research for details on Git best practice][duck-book-version-control]. This includes how to write good commit messages, how to branch correctly and solving merge conflicts.

If you want to modify the .gitignore files, see the template documentation for further details.

Our source code is stored on GitHub at https://github.com/best-practice-and-impact/govcookiecutter. Pull requests into main require at least one approved review.

Python

For Python code, we follow the GDS Way Python style guide with a line length of 88; the flake8 pre-commit hook should help with this!

Markdown

To keep the file uniform, all links should be referenced at the bottom of the markdown file. This also helps to keep the markdown file organised.

We also try to wrap Markdown to a line length of 88 characters. This is not strictly enforced in all cases, for example with long hyperlinks.

Testing

Tests are written using the pytest framework, with its configuration in the pyproject.toml file. Note, only the tests folder in the root direcrtory of this project are to run. To run the tests, enter the following command in your terminal:

pytest tests

Code coverage

Code coverage of Python scripts is measured using the coverage Python package; its configuration can be found in pyproject.toml. Note coverage only extends to Python scripts in the hooks, and {{ cookiecutter.repo_name }}/src folders.

To run code coverage, and view it as an HTML report, enter the following command in your terminal:

coverage run -m pytest
coverage html

or use the make command:

make coverage_html

The HTML report can be accessed at htmlcov/index.html.

Documentation

We write our documentation in MyST Markdown for use in Sphinx. This is mainly stored in the docs folder, unless it's more appropriate to store it elsewhere, like this file.

Please read our guidance on how to write accessible documentation, as well as our guidance on writing Sphinx documentation. This allows you to build the documentation into an accessible, searchable website.

Organisational frameworks

Organisational frameworks are stored in the .govcookiecutter/organisational_frameworks folder. If you would like to add your own organisation's framework, follow the instructions in the README.md file in that folder.

Footnotes

1. Only secrets of specific patterns are detected by the pre-commit hooks. ↩