Contributing

Welcome to the contributor guide of mantaray py.

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. Other resources are also listed in the excellent guide created by FreeCodeCamp.

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.

Issue Reports

If you experience bugs or general issues with mantaray py, 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.

Documentation improvements

You can help improve the documentation of mantaray py by making them more readable and coherent, or by adding missing information and correcting mistakes.

This documentation uses [mkdocs] 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.

!!! tip Please notice that the GitHub web interface provides a quick way for proposing changes. 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 build and serve them using [hatch] with hatch run docs:build and hatch run docs:serve, respectively.

Code Contributions

Submit an issue

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.

Clone the repository

1. Create a user account on GitHub 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 GitHub.

3. Clone this copy to your local disk:

git clone git@github.com:YourLogin/mantaray-py.git
cd mantaray-py

1. Make sure [hatch] is installed using pipx:

pipx install hatch

1. [only once] install pre-commit hooks in the default environment with:

hatch run pre-commit install

Implement your changes

1. Create a branch to hold your changes:

git checkout -b my-feature

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

1. Start your work on this branch. Don't forget to add docstrings in Google style to new functions, modules and classes, especially if they are part of public APIs.

2. Add yourself to the list of contributors in AUTHORS.md.

3. When you’re done editing, do:

git add <MODIFIED FILES>
git commit

to record your changes in git.

Please make sure to see the validation messages from pre-commit and fix any eventual issues. This should automatically use flake8/black to check/fix the code style in a way that is compatible with the project.

!!! info
    Don't forget to add unit tests and documentation in case your
    contribution adds a feature and is not just a bugfix.

    Moreover, writing an [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.

1. Please check that your changes don't break any unit tests with hatch run test:cov or hatch run test:no-cov to run the unitest with or without coverage reports, respectively.

Submit your contribution

1. If everything works fine, push your local branch to the remote server with:

git push -u origin my-feature

1. 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.

Even though, these resources focus on open source projects and communities, the general ideas behind collaborating with other developers to collectively create software are general and can be applied to all sorts of environments, including private companies and proprietary code bases.