Welcome to vptstools
contributor's guide.
This document focuses on getting any potential contributor familiarized with the development processes, but other kinds of contributions are also appreciated.
If you are new to using git or have never collaborated in a project previously, please have a look at contribution-guide.org.
Please notice, all users and contributors are expected to be open, considerate, reasonable, and respectful. When in doubt, Python Software Foundation's Code of Conduct is a good reference in terms of behavior guidelines.
If you experience bugs or general issues with vptstools
, please have a look on the issue tracker. If you don't see anything useful there, please feel free to fire an issue report.
:::{tip} Please don't forget to include the closed issues in your search. Sometimes a solution was already reported, and the problem is considered solved. :::
New issue reports should include information about your programming environment (e.g., operating system, Python version) and steps to reproduce the problem. Please try also to simplify the reproduction steps to a very minimal example that still illustrates the problem you are facing. By removing other factors, you help us to identify the root cause of the issue.
You can help improve vptstools
docs by making them more readable and coherent, or by adding missing information and correcting mistakes.
vptstools
documentation uses Sphinx as its main documentation compiler. This means that the docs are kept in the same repository as the project code, and that any documentation update is done in the same way was a code contribution.
The syntax used for the documentation is CommonMark with MyST extensions.
:::{tip}
Please notice that the GitHub web interface provides a quick way of propose changes in vptstools
's files. While this mechanism can
be tricky for normal code contributions, it works perfectly fine for contributing to the docs, and can be quite handy.
If you are interested in trying this method out, please navigate to
the docs
folder in the source repository, find which file you
would like to propose changes and click in the little pencil icon at the top, to open GitHub's code editor. Once you finish editing the file, please write a message in the form at the bottom of the page describing which changes have you made and what are the motivations behind them and submit your proposal.
:::
When working on documentation changes in your local machine, you can compile them using tox :
tox -e docs
and use Python's built-in web server for a preview in your web browser
(http://localhost:8000
):
python3 -m http.server --directory 'docs/_build/html'
The code is used both as a library to handle VPTS files (hdf5, csv,...) as well as the cli functionality to run the data processing services (conversion of files, updates of the Bucket,...).
Before you work on any non-trivial code contribution it's best to first create a report in the issue tracker to start a discussion on the subject. This often provides additional considerations and avoids unnecessary work.
-
Create an user account on GitHub if you do not already have one.
-
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 GitHub.
-
Clone this copy to your local disk:
git clone git@github.com:YourLogin/vptstools.git cd vptstools
-
Before you start coding, we recommend creating an isolated
virtual environment
_ to avoid any problems with your installed Python packages. This can be done via either virtualenv:python3 -m venv <ENVIRONMENT-NAME> source <ENVIRONMENT-NAME>/bin/activate
-
You should run:
pip install -U pip setuptools -e .[develop,transfer]
to be able to import the package under development in the Python REPL and installing the required development dependencies.
:::{tip} If you have |tox|_:: installed, you can use tox to create your development environment containing both the package dependencies and development requirements::
tox -e dev
:::
-
Create a branch to hold your changes:
git checkout -b my-feature
and start making changes. Never work on the main branch!
-
Start your work on this branch. Don't forget to add docstrings to new functions, modules and classes, especially if they are part of public APIs.
-
Add yourself to the list of contributors in
AUTHORS.md
. -
When you’re done editing, do:
git add <MODIFIED FILES> git commit
to record your changes in git.
:::{important} Don't forget to add unit tests and documentation in case your contribution adds an additional feature and is not just a bugfix.
Moreover, writing a descriptive commit message is highly recommended. In case of doubt, you can check the commit history with:
git log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --all
to look for recurring communication patterns. :::
-
Please check that your changes don't break any unit tests with:
tox
(after having installed tox with
pip install tox
orpipx
).You can also use tox to run several other pre-configured tasks in the repository. Try
tox -av
to see a list of the available checks.
-
If everything works fine, push your local branch to the remote server with:
git push -u origin my-feature
-
Go to the web page of your fork and click "Create pull request" to send your changes for review.
Find more detailed information in creating a PR. You might also want to open the PR as a draft first and mark it as ready for review after the feedbacks from the continuous integration (CI) system or any required fixes.
The following tips can be used when facing problems to build or test the package:
-
Make sure to fetch all the tags from the upstream repository. The command
git describe --abbrev=0 --tags
should return the version you are expecting. If you are trying to run CI scripts in a fork repository, make sure to push all the tags. You can also try to remove all the egg files or the complete egg folder, i.e.,.eggs
, as well as the*.egg-info
folders in thesrc
folder or potentially in the root of your project. -
Sometimes tox misses out when new dependencies are added, especially to
setup.cfg
anddocs/requirements.txt
. If you find any problems with missing dependencies when running a command with tox, try to recreate thetox
environment using the-r
flag. For example, instead of:tox -e docs
Try running:
tox -r -e docs
-
Make sure to have a reliable tox installation that uses the correct Python version (e.g., 3.7+). When in doubt you can run:
tox --version # OR which tox
If you have trouble and are seeing weird errors upon running tox, you can also try to create a dedicated virtual environment with a tox binary freshly installed. For example:
virtualenv .venv source .venv/bin/activate .venv/bin/pip install tox .venv/bin/tox -e all
-
Pytest can drop you in an interactive session in the case an error occurs. In order to do that you need to pass a
--pdb
option (for example by runningtox -- -k <NAME OF THE FALLING TEST> --pdb
). You can also setup breakpoints manually instead of using the--pdb
option.
Github Actions is used to automatic push releases to pypi by the publish step in release.yml
. To create a new release:
git checkout main
,git pull origin main
- Update the
CHANGELOG.md
with the changes for this new release - `git commit -m 'Update changelog for release X.X.X' CHANGELOG.md
git push origin master
- Add git tags:
git tag vX.X.X
- Push the git tags:
git push --tags
- On the release page draft a new release using the latest git tag
- Copy past the changes from the changelog in the dialog and publish release
- Check if Github Actions runs the deployment of docs and pypi
If it would be required ( and if you have correct user permissions on PyPI) the last step to publish a new version
for vptstools
to pypi can be done manually as well with the following steps:
- Make sure all unit tests are successful.
- Clean up the
dist
andbuild
folders withtox -e clean
(orrm -rf dist build
) to avoid confusion with old builds and Sphinx docs. - Run
tox -e build
and check that the files indist
have the correct version (no.dirty
or git hash) according to the git tag. Also check the sizes of the distributions, if they are too big (e.g., > 500KB), unwanted clutter may have been accidentally included. - Run
tox -e publish -- --repository pypi
and check that everything was uploaded to PyPI correctly.
(new-vptscsv-version)=
To support a new version of the VPTS-CSV data exchange format, following adjustments in the {py:mod}vptstools.vpts_csv
module are required:
- Create a new class
VptsCsvVX
which subclasses from the abstract class {py:class}vptstools.vpts_csv.AbstractVptsCsv
- Overwrite the abstract methods to define 'no data' representation, the 'Undetect' representation, the sorting logic
and the mapping of the individual fields from ODIM bird profile to the VPTS CSV data format. Check the
{py:class}
vptstools.vpts_csv.AbstractVptsCsv
documentation for more info. - Link the string version ID (v1, v2,..) with the correct
AbstractVptsCsv
child class by extending the {py:func}vptstools.vpts_csv.get_vpts_version
with a new mapping from version string to class instance. - Add the string version to the unit test in the
@pytest.mark.parametrize("vpts_version", ["v1.0", "vX.X])
so these existing unit tests are also checked for the new version.