Contributing to datreant

datreant is an open-source project, with its development driven by the needs of its users. Anyone is welcome to contribute to any of its packages, which can all be found under the datreant GitHub organization.

Development model

datreant subpackages follow the development model outlined by Vincent Driessen , with the develop branch being the unstable focal point for development. The master branch merges from the develop branch only when all tests are passing, and usually only before a release. In general, master should be usable at all times, while develop may be broken at any particular moment.

Setting up your development environment

We recommend using virtual environments with virtualenvwrapper. Since datreant is a collection of subpackages, you will need to clone whichever repositories you are interested in contributing to. Since all datreant subpackages depend on datreant.core, you will probably want to clone this one:

git clone git@github.com:datreant/datreant.core.git

Make a new virtualenv called datreant with:

mkvirtualenv datreant

and make a development installation of datreant.core with:

cd datreant.core
pip install -e .

The -e flag will cause pip to call setup with the develop option. This means that any changes on the source code will immediately be reflected in your virtual environment.

Repeat the same operations for any other datreant subpackage you wish to work on. Note that other subpackages are likely to have heavier dependencies.

Running the tests locally

As you work on a datreant subpackage, it’s important to see how your changes affected its expected behavior. With your virtualenv enabled:

workon datreant

switch to the top-level directory of the subpackage you are working on and run:

py.test --cov src/ --pep8 src/

This will run all the tests for that subpackage (often inside src/datreant/<subpackage_name>/tests), with coverage and PEP8 checks.

Note that to run the tests you will need to install py.test and the coverage and PEP8 plugins into your virtualenv:

pip install py.test pytest pytest-cov pytest-pep8