This document is a guide to contributing to CVXPY.
We welcome all contributions. You don't need to be an expert in optimization to help out.
Contributions are made through pull requests. Before sending a pull request, make sure you do the following:
- Check that your code adheres to our coding style
- Add our license to new files
- Write unit tests
- Run the unit tests and check that they're passing
- Run the benchmarks to make sure your change does not introduce a regression
You'll need to build CVXPY locally in order to start editing code. We recommend that you do this in a fresh virtual environment.
To install CVXPY from source, clone the Github repository, navigate to the repository root, and run the following command:
python setup.py develop
To contribute to CVXPY, send us pull requests. For those new to contributing, check out Github's guide.
Once you've made your pull request, a member of the CVXPY development team will assign themselves to review it. You might have a few back-and-forths with your reviewer before it is accepted, which is completely normal. Your pull request will trigger continuous integration tests for many different Python versions and different platforms. If these tests start failing, please fix your code and send another commit, which will re-trigger the tests.
If you'd like to add a new feature to CVXPY, or a new example to our library, please do propose your change on a Github issue, to make sure that your priorities align with ours.
If you'd like to contribute code but don't know where to start, try one of the following:
- Read the CVXPY source and enhance the documentation, or address TODOs
- Browse the issue tracker, and look for the issues tagged "help wanted".
- Polish the example library or add new examples
- Add a benchmark
Please add the following license to new files:
"""
Copyright, the CVXPY authors
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.
"""
We use flake8 and isort to enforce our Python coding style. Before sending us a pull request, navigate to the project root and run
flake8 cvxpy/
isort .
to make sure that your changes abide by our style conventions. Please fix any errors that are reported before sending the pull request.
Optionally, the package pre-commit can be installed to check these conventions automatically before every commit.
pip install pre-commit
pre-commit install
Note on isort: if you see files changed by isort that you did not actively make changes to as part of your PR, it is an indication that the config was not picked up correctly. See issue 1653 for details.
Most code changes will require new unit tests. (Even bug fixes require unit tests,
since the presence of bugs usually indicates insufficient tests.) CVXPY tests
live in the directory cvxpy/tests
, which contains many files, each of which
contains many unit tests. When adding tests, try to find a file in which your
tests should belong; if you're testing a new feature, you might want to create
a new test file.
We use the standard Python unittest
framework for our tests. Tests are organized into classes, which inherit from
BaseTest
(see cvxpy/tests/base_test.py
). Every method beginning with test_
is a unit
test.
We use pytest
to run our unit tests, which you can install with pip install pytest
.
To run all unit tests, cd
into cvxpy/tests
and run the following command:
pytest
To run tests in a specific file (e.g., test_dgp.py
), use
pytest test_dgp.py
To run a specific test method (e.g., TestDgp.test_product
), use
pytest test_dgp.py::TestDgp::test_product
Please make sure that your change doesn't cause any of the unit tests to fail.
pytest
suppresses stdout by default. To see stdout, pass the -s
flag
to pytest
.
CVXPY has a few benchmarks in cvxpy/tests/test_benchmarks.py
, which test
the time to canonicalize problems. Please run
pytest -s cvxpy/tests/test_benchmarks.py
with and without your change, to make sure no performance regressions are introduced. If you are making a code contribution, please include the output of the above command (with and without your change) in your pull request.