How can I contribute?

Contributing

Welcome to the open_nipals contributor’s guide.

Installation

If you would like to contribute to the code, please clone the github repository and install the package from it following these steps:

Clone git repository
Open a command line
Navigate to git repository
Run pip install .[testing]

Code Contributions

Code contributions should be made in a new feature branch. After a feature is completed please open a pull request and tag at least two people for review. In your request include:

The purpose of the feature
Background on why the feature is needed
How to test the feature (e.g. example code)

This code follows the semantic versioning scheme. If the changes are not reflected in the version number, please use git tag. See this page for more information.

Reviewing Code contributions

As a reviewer please ensure the following is true:

Tests are functional
New Pull Request features are documented (i.e. docstrings and type hints)
the code is formatted with ruff and a line length of 79 characters following PEP 8

Documentation Improvements

You can help improve open_nipals docs by making them more readable and coherent, or by adding missing information and correcting mistakes.

open_nipals 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.

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'

Create an environment

Before you start coding, we recommend creating an isolated [virtual environment] to avoid any problems with your installed Python packages, e.g. with:

conda create -n open_nipals python=3.14
conda activate open_nipals

Installation

Ensure you have a git client installed.
Clone the repository to your local computer.
Install the open_nipals package from the local folder pip install -e .[testing]

Implement your changes

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].
Please check that your changes don’t break any unit tests with:
```
tox
```
(after having installed tox with pip install tox or pipx).

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.

Testing

Testing should begin with pytest and, eventually, end with tox. pytest will illuminate any issues with the code itself while tox will highlight dependency conflicts. It’s much more expensive to run.

Prior to executing tox the first time, you will need to have all of the python environments specified in the tox.ini file loaded. No need to build each combination, just a flat python 3.9, 3.10, 3.11, etc environment will suffice; tox should detect that and then build from there.

All PRs attempting to merge into the main branch of the public repository will trigger a github actions pipeline running flake8-linting and tox. Therefore, running tox is not strictly necessary for these kind of commits. However, if in doubt, please run tox locally before pushing to the public repo. The github actions pipeline lives in the (./github/workflows/python-app.py)-file. If new python versions are included into the tox run, please do not only include them into the tox.ini, but also in the python matrix in the workflow file.

If you hit errors with tox, first try deleting the .tox folder.

Troubleshooting

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 the src folder or potentially in the root of your project.
Sometimes tox misses out when new dependencies are added, especially to setup.cfg and docs/requirements.txt. If you find any problems with missing dependencies when running a command with tox, try to recreate the tox 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 running tox -- -k <NAME OF THE FALLING TEST> --pdb). You can also setup breakpoints manually instead of using the --pdb option.