Contributing

Welcome to pyElli 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.

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 pyElli, please have a look on the issue tracker. If you don’t see anything useful there, please feel free to fire an issue report.

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 pyElli docs by making them more readable and coherent, or by adding missing information and correcting mistakes.

pyElli 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.

Code Contributions

An architecture description, design principles or at least a summary of the
main concepts will make it easy for potential contributors to get started
quickly.

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 pyElli python=3 six virtualenv pytest pytest-cov
conda activate pyElli

Clone the repository

Create an user account on github if you do not already have one.
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 |the repository service|.

Clone this copy to your local disk

git clone git@github.com:YourLogin/pyElli.git
cd pyElli

You should run
```
pip install -U pip setuptools -e .
```
to be able run putup --help.

Implement your changes

Create a branch to hold your changes
```
git checkout -b my-feature
```
and start making changes. Never work on the master branch!
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.
Add yourself to the list of contributors in AUTHORS.md.
When you’re done editing, do
```
git add <MODIFIED FILES>
git commit
```
to record your changes in git.

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.

Please check that your changes don’t break any unit tests with:
```
pytest
```

Submit your contribution

If everything works fine, push your local branch to |the repository service| with:
```
git push -u origin my-feature
```
Go to the web page of your fork and click contribute to send your changes for review.