First off, thank you for considering contributing to attrs! It's people like you who make it such a great tool for everyone.
This document intends to make contribution more accessible by codifying tribal knowledge and expectations. Don't be afraid to open half-finished PRs, and ask questions if something is unclear!
Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms. Please report any harm to Hynek Schlawack in any way you find appropriate.
In case you‘d like to help out but don’t want to deal with GitHub, there's a great opportunity: help your fellow developers on Stack Overflow!
The official tag is python-attrs and helping out in support frees us up to improve attrs instead!
# pragma: no cover.Obey PEP 8 and PEP 257. We use the """-on-separate-lines style for docstrings:
def func(x): """ Do something. :param str x: A very important parameter. :rtype: str """
If you add or change public APIs, tag the docstring using .. versionadded:: 16.0.0 WHAT or .. versionchanged:: 16.2.0 WHAT.
We use isort to sort our imports, and we use Black with line length of 79 characters to format our code. As long as you run our full tox suite before committing, or install our pre-commit hooks (ideally you‘ll do both – see Local Development Environment below), you won’t have to spend any time on formatting your code at all. If you don't, CI will catch it for you – but that seems like a waste of your time!
Write your asserts as expected == actual to line them up nicely:
x = f() assert 42 == x.some_attribute assert "foo" == x._a_private_attribute
To run the test suite, all you need is a recent tox. It will ensure the test suite runs with all dependencies against all Python versions just as it will in our CI. If you lack some Python versions, you can can always limit the environments like tox -e py27,py38, or make it a non-failure using tox --skip-missing-interpreters.
In that case you should look into asdf or pyenv, which make it very easy to install many different Python versions in parallel.
Write good test docstrings.
To ensure new features work well with the rest of the system, they should be also added to our Hypothesis testing strategy, which can be found in tests/strategies.py.
If you've changed or added public APIs, please update our type stubs (files ending in .pyi).
Use semantic newlines in reStructuredText files (files ending in .rst):
This is a sentence. This is another sentence.
If you start a new section, add two blank lines before and one blank line after the header, except if two headers follow immediately after each other:
Last line of previous section. Header of New Top Section ------------------------- Header of New Section ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ First line of new section.
If you add a new feature, demonstrate its awesomeness on the examples page!
If your change is noteworthy, there needs to be a changelog entry so our users can learn about it!
To avoid merge conflicts, we use the towncrier package to manage our changelog. towncrier uses independent files for each pull request – so called news fragments – instead of one monolithic changelog file. On release, those news fragments are compiled into our CHANGELOG.rst.
You don't need to install towncrier yourself, you just have to abide by a few simple rules:
For each pull request, add a new file into changelog.d with a filename adhering to the pr#.(change|deprecation|breaking).rst schema: For example, changelog.d/42.change.rst for a non-breaking change that is proposed in pull request #42.
As with other docs, please use semantic newlines within news fragments.
Wrap symbols like modules, functions, or classes into double backticks so they are rendered in a monospace font.
Wrap arguments into asterisks like in docstrings: Added new argument *an_argument*.
If you mention functions or other callables, add parentheses at the end of their names: attrs.func() or attrs.Class.method(). This makes the changelog a lot more readable.
Prefer simple past tense or constructions with “now”. For example:
attrs.validators.func().attrs.func() now doesn't crash the Large Hadron Collider anymore when passed the foobar argument.If you want to reference multiple issues, copy the news fragment to another filename. towncrier will merge all news fragments with identical contents into one entry with multiple links to the respective pull requests.
Example entries:
Added ``attrs.validators.func()``. The feature really *is* awesome.
or:
``attrs.func()`` now doesn't crash the Large Hadron Collider anymore when passed the *foobar* argument. The bug really *was* nasty.
tox -e changelog will render the current changelog to the terminal if you have any doubts.
You can (and should) run our test suite using tox. However, you’ll probably want a more traditional environment as well. We highly recommend to develop using the latest Python release because we try to take advantage of modern features whenever possible.
First create a virtual environment so you don't break your system-wide Python installation. It’s out of scope for this document to list all the ways to manage virtual environments in Python, but if you don’t already have a pet way, take some time to look at tools like direnv, virtualfish, and virtualenvwrapper.
Next, get an up to date checkout of the attrs repository:
$ git clone git@github.com:python-attrs/attrs.git
or if you want to use git via https:
$ git clone https://github.com/python-attrs/attrs.git
Change into the newly created directory and after activating your virtual environment install an editable version of attrs along with its tests and docs requirements:
$ cd attrs $ pip install --upgrade pip setuptools # PLEASE don't skip this step $ pip install -e '.[dev]'
At this point,
$ python -m pytest
should work and pass, as should:
$ cd docs
$ make html
The built documentation can then be found in docs/_build/html/.
To avoid committing code that violates our style guide, we strongly advise you to install pre-commit [^dev] hooks:
$ pre-commit install
You can also run them anytime (as our tox does) using:
$ pre-commit run --all-files
[^dev]: pre-commit should have been installed into your virtualenv automatically when you ran pip install -e '.[dev]' above. If pre-commit is missing, your probably need to run pip install -e '.[dev]' again.
attrs is maintained by team of volunteers that is always open to new members that share our vision of a fast, lean, and magic-free library that empowers programmers to write better code with less effort. If you'd like to join, just get a pull request merged and ask to be added in the very same pull request!
The simple rule is that everyone is welcome to review/merge pull requests of others but nobody is allowed to merge their own code.
Hynek Schlawack acts reluctantly as the BDFL and has the final say over design decisions.