CONTRIBUTING.md

How To Contribute

First off, thank you for considering contributing to interrogate! It's people like you who make it such a great tool for everyone.

This document intends to make contribution more accessible by codifying tribal knowledge and expectations. Don't be afraid to open half-finished PRs, and ask questions if something is unclear!

Workflow

• No contribution is too small! Please submit as many fixes for typos and grammar bloopers as you can!
• Try to limit each pull request to one change only.
• Since we squash on merge, it's up to you how you handle updates to the master branch. Whether you prefer to rebase on master or merge master into your branch, do whatever is more comfortable for you.
• Always add tests and docs for your code. This is a hard rule; patches with missing tests or documentation will not be merged.
• Make sure your changes pass our CI. You won't get any feedback until it's green unless you ask for it.
• Once you've addressed review feedback, make sure to bump the pull request with a short note, so we know you're done.
• Avoid breaking backwards compatibility.

Code

• Obey PEP 8, PEP 257, and the Google Python Style Guide (mostly¹). We use restructuredtext syntax, and have a summary line starting the """ block:

  def func(x):
      """Do something.
  
      Maybe some more "something" context that can span
      multiple lines.
  
      :param str x: A very important parameter.
      :rtype: str
      """

• If you add or change public APIs, tag the docstring using version directives like .. versionadded:: 1.2.0 WHAT or .. versionchanged:: 1.2.1 WHAT.

• We follow the Google Python Style Guide for sorting our imports enforced by isort, and we follow the Black code style with a line length of 79 characters.As long as you run our full tox suite before committing, or install our pre-commit hooks (ideally you'll do both -- see Local Development Environment), you won't have to spend any time on formatting your code at all. If you don't, CI will catch it for you -- but that seems like a waste of your time!

Tests

• Write your asserts as expected == actual to line them up nicely:

   x = f()
  
   assert 42 == x.some_attribute
   assert "foo" == x._a_private_attribute

• To run the test suite, all you need is a recent tox. It will ensure the test suite runs with all dependencies against all Python versions just as it will in our CI. If you lack some Python versions, you can can always limit the environments like tox -e py36,py37 (in that case you may want to look into pyenv, which makes it very easy to install many different Python versions in parallel).

• Write good test docstrings.

Documentation

Project-related documentation is written in restructuredtext (.rst). GitHub-related project documentation (e.g. this file you're reading, CONTRIBUTING.md) is written in Markdown, as GitHub doesn't support .rst files for some of their features (e.g. automatically picking up the CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md)

• If you start a new section, add two blank lines before and one blank line after the header, except if two headers follow immediately after each other:

   Last line of previous section.
  
   Header of New Top Section
   -------------------------
  
   Header of New Section
   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  
   First line of new section.

• If you add a new feature, demonstrate its awesomeness under Usage in README.rst!

Local Development Environment

You can (and should) run our test suite using tox. However, you’ll probably want a more traditional environment as well. We highly recommend to develop using the latest Python 3 release because interrogate tries to take advantage of modern features whenever possible.

First create a virtual environment. It’s out of scope for this document to list all the ways to manage virtual environments in Python, but if you don’t already have a pet way, take some time to look at tools like pyenv-virtualenv, pew, virtualfish, virtualenvwrapper, and pyenv-virtualenvwrapper.

Next, get an up to date checkout of the interrogate repository:

$ git clone git@github.com:econchick/interrogate.git

or if you want to use git via https:

$ git clone https://github.com/econchick/interrogate.git

Change into the newly created directory and after activating your virtual environment install an editable version of interrogate along with its tests and docs requirements:

(env) $ cd interrogate
(env) $ pip install -e '.[dev]'

At this point,

(env) $ python -m pytest

should work and pass, as should:

(env) $ cd docs
(env) $ make livehtml

The built documentation can then be found in localhost:8888.

To avoid committing code that violates our style guide, we advise you to install pre-commit² hooks:

(env) $ pre-commit install

You can also run them anytime (as our tox does, but always run tox outside of a virtual environment):

(env) $ pre-commit run --all-files

Code of Conduct

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms. Please report any harm to interrogate-project [at] lynnroot.com for anything you find appropriate.

Thank you for considering contributing to interrogate!

Footnotes

1. Due to personal preference, this project differs from Google's style guide in a few ways:

   • Instead of using Google's approach for documenting arguments, return/yields, and raises, use restructuredtext syntax as recommended by PEP-0258.
   • Instead of using pylint, use flake8.
   • Instead of using yapf, use Black.
   ↩

2. pre-commit should have been installed into your virtualenv automatically when you ran pip install -e '.[dev]' above. If pre-commit is missing, it may be that you need to re-run pip install -e '.[dev]'. ↩