How to Contribute

Do you want to contribute fixes or improvements?

AWesome! Thank you very much, and let’s get started.

Set up a development environment

The first thing that you need is a development environment so that you can run the test suite, update the documentation, and everything else that is involved in contributing. The easiest way to do that is to create a virtual environment for your endevours:

$ python3.4 -mvenv env

Don’t worry about writing code against previous versions of Python unless you you don’t have a choice. If you don’t have a choice, then install virtualenv to create the environment instead. The next step is to install the development tools that this project uses. These are listed in requires/development.txt:

$ env/bin/pip install -qr requires/development.txt

At this point, you will have everything that you need to develop at your disposal. setup.py is the swiss-army knife in your development tool chest. It provides the following commands:

./setup.py build_sphinx
Generate the documentation using sphinx.
./setup.py flake8
Run flake8 over the code and report style violations.

If any of the preceding commands give you problems, then you will have to fix them before your pull request will be accepted.

Submitting a Pull Request

Once you have made your modifications and added any necessary documentation, it is time to contribute back for posterity. You’ve probably already cloned this repository and created a new branch. If you haven’t, then checkout what you have as a branch and roll back master to where you found it. Then push your repository up to github and issue a pull request. Describe your changes in the request and someone will review it, and eventually merge it and release a new version.