Contributing to Xpublish

Contributions are highly welcomed and appreciated. Every little help counts, so do not hesitate!

Feature requests and feedback

Do you like Xpublish? Share some love on Twitter or in your blog posts!

We’d also like to hear about your propositions and suggestions. Feel free to submit them as issues and:

• Explain in detail how they should work.

• Keep the scope as narrow as possible. This will make it easier to implement.

Report bugs

Report bugs for Xpublish in the issue tracker.

If you are reporting a bug, please include:

• Your operating system name and version.

• Any details about your local setup that might be helpful in troubleshooting, specifically the Python interpreter version, installed libraries, and Xpublish version.

• Detailed steps to reproduce the bug.

If you can write a demonstration test that currently fails but should pass (xfail), that is a very useful commit to make as well, even if you cannot fix the bug itself.

Fix bugs

Look through the GitHub issues for bugs.

Talk to developers to find out how you can fix specific bugs.

Write documentation

xpublish could always use more documentation. What exactly is needed?

• More complementary documentation. Have you perhaps found something unclear?

• Docstrings. There can never be too many of them.

• Blog posts, articles and such – they’re all very appreciated.

You can also edit documentation files directly in the GitHub web interface, without using a local copy. This can be convenient for small fixes.

To build the documentation locally, you first need to have a local development environment setup by following the the steps in Preparing Pull Requests through the Install dependencies into a new conda environment step.

You can then build the documentation with the following commands:

$ conda activate xpublish-dev
$ cd docs
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ make html

The built documentation should be available in the docs/_build/ folder.

Preparing Pull Requests

1. Fork the xpublish GitHub repository. It’s fine to use xpublish as your fork repository name because it will live under your user.

2. Clone your fork locally using git and create a branch:

   $ git clone git@github.com:YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/xpublish.git
   $ cd xpublish
   
   # now, to fix a bug or add feature create your own branch off "main":
   
   $ git checkout -b your-bugfix-feature-branch-name main
   

3. Install pre-commit and its hook on the Xpublish repo:

   $ pip install --user pre-commit
   $ pre-commit install
   

   Afterwards pre-commit will run whenever you commit.

   https://pre-commit.com/ is a framework for managing and maintaining multi-language pre-commit hooks to ensure code-style and code formatting is consistent.

4. Install dependencies into a new conda environment:

   $ conda create -n xpublish-dev
   $ conda activate xpublish-dev
   $ pip install -r dev-requirements.txt
   $ pip install --no-deps -e .
   

5. Run all the tests

   Now running tests is as simple as issuing this command:

   $ conda activate xpublish-dev
   $ pytest
   

   This command will run tests via the “pytest” tool.

6. You can now edit your local working copy and run the tests again as necessary. Please follow PEP-8 for naming.

   When committing, pre-commit will re-format the files if necessary.

7. Commit and push once your tests pass and you are happy with your change(s):

   $ git commit -a -m "<commit message>"
   $ git push -u
   

8. Finally, submit a pull request through the GitHub website using this data:

   head-fork: YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/xpublish
   compare: your-branch-name
   
   base-fork: xpublish-community/xpublish
   base: main