Contributing

ConfigUpdater is an open-source project and needs your help to improve. If you experience bugs or in general issues, please file an issue report on our issue tracker. If you also want to contribute code or improve the documentation it’s best to create a Pull Request (PR) on Github. Here is a short introduction how it works.

Code Contributions

Submit an issue

Before you work on any non-trivial code contribution it’s best to first create an issue report 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 to install Miniconda which allows to setup a dedicated development environment named configupdater with:

conda create -n configupdater python=3 virtualenv pytest pytest-cov

Then activate the environment configupdater with:

source activate configupdater

Clone the repository

1. Create a Gitub account if you do not already have one.

2. 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 GitHub server.

3. Clone this copy to your local disk:

   git clone git@github.com:YourLogin/configupdater.git
   

4. Run python setup.py develop to install configupdater into your environment.

5. Install pre-commit:

   pip install pre-commit
   pre-commit install
   

   PyScaffold project comes with a lot of hooks configured to automatically help the developer to check the code being written.

6. Create a branch to hold your changes:

   git checkout -b my-feature
   

   and start making changes. Never work on the main branch!

7. Start your work on this branch. When you’re done editing, do:

   git add modified_files
   git commit
   

   to record your changes in Git, then push them to GitHub with:

   git push -u origin my-feature
   

8. Please check that your changes don’t break any unit tests with:

   python setup.py test
   

   Don’t forget to also add unit tests in case your contribution adds an additional feature and is not just a bugfix.

9. Use flake8 to check your code style.

10. Add yourself to the list of contributors in AUTHORS.rst.

11. Go to the web page of your ConfigUpdater fork, and click “Create pull request” to send your changes to the maintainers for review. Find more detailed information creating a PR.