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Contributing to Lice2

Thank you for your interest in contributing to Lice2! We welcome all contributions, big or small.

If you are not sure where to start, please take a look at the open issues. If you have an idea for a new feature or would like to report a bug, please open a new issue.

We also welcome contributions to the documentation. If you find any errors or would like to suggest improvements, please open a new issue or submit a pull

Prerequisites

  • Since this is a Python project, you will need to have Python installed on your machine. You can download the latest version of Python from the official website or using your Operating system's package manager.

  • I'd recommend using pyenv to manage your Python installations, the pyenv-installer works for Linux and Mac OS X. For Windows, you can use the pyenv-win port. See here for installation instructions.

  • This project requires Python 3.9 or higher.

  • We also use Poetry to manage our dependencies. You should have this installed as well. You can install Poetry by following the instructions on the Poetry website.

Getting Started

Before you start contributing, please make sure you have read and understood our Code of Conduct and License.

To get started, follow these steps:

  1. Fork the repository and clone it to your local machine.
  2. Install the required dependencies (see next section).
  3. Create a new branch for your changes: git checkout -b my-new-feature.
  4. Make your changes and commit them: git commit -am 'Add some feature'.
  5. Push your changes to your fork: git push origin my-new-feature.
  6. Create a new pull request.

Install Dependencies

Run the following command to install the required dependencies:

poetry install

You then need to activate the virtual environment:

poetry shell

From here you can start working on the project. If you are using an IDE such as VSCode or PyCharm, you can set their Python interpreter setting to use the virtual environment that has just been created.

Install Git Pre-Commit hooks

Please do this if you are intending to submit a PR. It will check commits locally before they are pushed up to the Repo.

$ pre-commit install
pre-commit installed at .git/hooks/pre-commit

This will ensure that all code meets the required linting standard before being committed.

Run pre-commit manually

You can run these checks manually on all staged files using the below command :

poe pre

Testing

We are using pytest for testing. Tests will automatically be run when you submit a pull request. You can also run them manually using the following command:

pytest

If you add any new features, please add tests for them. This will help us to ensure that the code is working as expected and will prevent any regressions.

Changelog

The changelog is automatically generated using github-changelog-md, so please do not edit it manually.

For maintainers, there is a POE task that will run this and update the changelog file.

poe changelog

You would also need to add a GitHub Personal Access Token to a local config file as usual. See the section in that tools Documentation for information.

However, you should NOT include a change to the CHANGELOG.md file in any Pull Requests. This will be handled by the maintainers when a new release is made. Your GitHub username will be added to the changelog automatically beside your PR.

Convenience Tasks

There are a few other convenience tasks that can be run using the poe command. These are defined in the pyproject.toml file.

Each of these tasks can have extra options added which will be passed to the underlying tool.

Run mypy on the code base in strict mode:

poe mypy

Format the code using ruff format:

poe format

Lint the code using ruff check:

poe ruff

Run ruff, mypy and format at the same time:

poe lint

Documentation Tasks

These are to help with developing and updating the documentation.

  • poe docs:serve - Serve the MkDocs locally for testing and development
  • poe docs:serve:all - Same as above, but opens to all interfaces so you can view it on other devices on your network
  • poe docs:build - Build the MkDocs site into the dist folder
  • poe docs:publish - Publish the docs to your GitHub pages. Note that only those with write-access to this repo can do this.

Guidelines

Here are some guidelines to follow when contributing to Lice2:

  • Do not update the version number in the pyproject.toml file. This will be done by the maintainers when a new release is made.
  • Follow the PEP 8 style guide. The pre-commit hooks will check for this. We are using Ruff as both a linter and code formatter.
  • Try to have no linting errors or warnings. The pre-commit hooks will check for this also.
  • MyPy is installed and we are using type hints. Please try to add type hints to your code. If you see any areas of the code that are missing type hints, please feel free to open a PR and add them 😁!
  • Write clear and concise commit messages.
  • Write tests for your code.
  • Make sure your code passes all tests before submitting a pull request.
  • Document your code using docstrings.
  • Use GitHub issues to report bugs or suggest new features.

Contact

If you have any questions or need help with contributing, please contact me @seapagan on GitHub. You can also use the GitHub Discussions feature.

Happy contributing!