Contributing

Thank you for your interest in improving this project. This project is open-source under the MIT license and welcomes contributions in the form of bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests.

Here is a list of important resources for contributors:

How to report a bug

Report bugs on the Issue Tracker.

When filing an issue, make sure to answer these questions:

  • Which operating system and Python version are you using?
  • Which version of this project are you using?
  • What did you do?
  • What did you expect to see?
  • What did you see instead?

The best way to get your bug fixed is to provide a test case, and/or steps to reproduce the issue.

How to request a feature

Request features on the Issue Tracker.

How to set up your development environment

You need Python and the following tools:

Install the package with the existing development requirements:

$ uv sync --frozen

To also update packages, do not use the --frozen flag.

To build the documentation locally, you will also need Make and Quarto (these are non-Python dependencies).

You can build the docs locally to look at them with make, which runs a command to build the README and then another to build the website which can then be found in docs/_site/. It’s make clean to remove the existing README.

To publish new docs to GitHub Pages (where the documentation is displayed as web pages), it’s make publish—but only devs with admin rights will be able to execute this.

How to test the project

Run the full test suite:

$ uv run nox

List the available Nox sessions:

$ uv run nox --list-sessions

You can also run a specific Nox session. For example, invoke the unit test suite like this:

$ uv run nox --session=tests

Unit tests are located in the tests directory, and are written using the pytest testing framework.

You may need to use, for example, uv run nox to ensure that the tests are run in the right environment.

For the pre-commit checks, use

$ uv run pre-commit run --all-files

How to submit changes

Open a pull request to submit changes to this project.

Your pull request needs to meet the following guidelines for acceptance:

  • The Nox test suite must pass without errors and warnings.
  • Include unit tests. This project aims to maintain 96% code coverage.
  • If your changes add functionality, update the documentation accordingly.
  • Run make to generate the new documentation.
  • Run the pre-commit suite before committing.

Feel free to submit early, though—we can always iterate on this.

To run linting and code formatting checks before committing your change, you need to run the following command:

$ uv run nox --session=pre-commit -- install

It is recommended to open an issue before starting work on anything. This will allow a chance to talk it over with the owners and validate your approach.

How to create a package release

  • Open a new branch with the version name

  • Change the version in pyproject.toml (you can run uv run version_bumper.py, which has script-level dependencies)

  • Commit the change with a new version label as the commit message (checking the tests pass)

  • Head to GitHub and merge into main (again, if the CI works)

  • Draft a new release based on that most recent merge commit, using the new version as the tag

  • Confirm the release draft on GitHub

  • The automatic release GitHub Action will push to PyPI.

If you ever need distributable files, you can use the uv build command locally.

How to build the documentation manually and locally

You shouldn’t need to publish the documentation because there’s a GitHub action that covers it automatically whenever there’s a new release. But to upload the documentation manually, it’s

  • Run make to build the documentation
  • Run make publish to publish the documentation