Contributing

Bug reports, feature suggestions and other contributions are greatly appreciated! pysatModels is a community-driven project and welcomes both feedback and contributions.

Short version

  • Submit bug reports and feature requests at GitHub Issues
  • Make pull requests to the develop branch

Bug reports

When reporting a bug please include:

  • Your operating system name and version
  • Any details about your local setup that might be helpful in troubleshooting
  • Detailed steps to reproduce the bug

Feature requests and feedback

The best way to send feedback is to file an issue at GitHub Issues.

If you are proposing a feature:

  • Explain in detail how it would work.
  • Keep the scope as narrow as possible, to make it easier to implement.
  • Remember that this is a volunteer-driven project, and that code contributions are welcome :)

Development

To set up pysatModels for local development:

  • Fork pysat on GitHub.
  • Clone your fork locally:
git clone git@github.com:your_name_here/pysatModels.git
  • Create a branch for local development:
git checkout -b name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature

Now you can make your changes locally. Tests for new instruments are performed automatically. Tests for custom functions should be added to the appropriately named file in pysatModels/tests. For example, the averaging routines in avg.py are tested in pysatModels/tests/test_avg.py. If no test file exists, then you should create one. This testing uses pytest, which will run tests on any python file in the test directory that starts with test_.

  • When you’re done making changes, run all the checks from the
    pysatModels/tests directory to ensure that nothing is broken on your local system. You may need to install pytest and pytest-flake8 first.
python -m pytest -vs --flake8
  • Update or add documentation (in docs), if relevant. If you have added
    a new routine, you will need to add an example in the docs/examples folder.
  • Commit your changes and push your branch to GitHub. Our commit statements
    follow the basic rules in the Numpy/SciPy workflow:
git add .
git commit -m "TYPE: Brief description of your changes"
git push origin name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature
  • Submit a pull request through the GitHub website. Pull requests should be
    made to the develop branch.

Pull Request Guidelines

If you need some code review or feedback while you’re developing the code, just make a pull request. Pull requests should be made to the develop branch.

For merging, you should:

  1. Include an example for use
  2. Add a note to CHANGELOG.md about the changes
  3. Ensure that all checks passed (current checks include Scrutinizer, Travis-CI, and Coveralls).

If you don’t have all the necessary Python versions available locally or have trouble building all the testing environments, you can rely on Travis to run the tests for each change you add in the pull request. Because testing here will delay tests by other developers, please ensure that the code passes all tests on your local system first.