Contributing to gospl

Contributions of any kind to gospl are more than welcome. That does not mean new code only, but also improvements of documentation and user guide, additional tests (ideally filling the gaps in existing suite) or bug report or idea what could be added or done better.

All contributions should go through our GitHub repository. Bug reports, ideas or even questions should be raised by opening an issue on the GitHub tracker. Suggestions for changes in code or documentation should be submitted as a pull request. However, if you are not sure what to do, feel free to open an issue. All discussion will then take place on GitHub to keep the development of gospl transparent.

If you decide to contribute to the codebase, ensure that you are using an up-to-date master branch. The latest development version will always be there, including the documentation (powered by sphinx).

Seven Steps for Contributing

There are seven basic steps to contributing to gospl:

  1. Fork the gospl git repository

  2. Create a development environment

  3. Install momepy dependencies

  4. Make a development build of gospl

  5. Update the documentation

  6. Format code

  7. Submit a Pull Request

Each of the steps is detailed below.

1. Fork the gospl git repository

Git can be complicated for new users, but you no longer need to use command line to work with git. If you are not familiar with git, we recommend using tools on GitHub.org, GitHub Desktop or tools with included git like Atom. However, if you want to use command line, you can fork gospl repository using following:

git clone git@github.com:your-user-name/gospl.git gospl-yourname
cd gospl-yourname
git remote add upstream git://github.com/Geodels/gospl

This creates the directory gospl-yourname and connects your repository to the upstream (main project) gospl repository.

Then simply create a new branch of master branch.

2. Create a development environment

A development environment is a virtual space where you can keep an independent installation of gospl. This makes it easy to keep both a stable version of python in one place you use for work, and a development version (which you may break while playing with code) in another.

An easy way to create a gospl development environment is as follows:

  • Install either Anaconda or miniconda

  • Make sure that you have cloned the repository

  • cd to the gospl source directory

Tell conda to create a new environment, named gospl_dev, or any other name you would like for this environment, by running:

conda create -n gospl_dev python=3.8

This will create the new environment, and not touch any of your existing environments, nor any existing python installation.

To work in this environment, Windows users should activate it as follows:

activate gospl_dev

macOS and Linux users should use:

conda activate gospl_dev

You will then see a confirmation message to indicate you are in the new development environment.

To view your environments:

conda info -e

To return to you home root environment:

deactivate

See the full conda docs here.

At this point you can easily do a development install, as detailed in the next sections.

3. Installing Dependencies

To run momepy in an development environment, you must first install momepy’s dependencies. We suggest doing so using the following commands (executed after your development environment has been activated) to ensure compatibility of all dependencies:

conda config --env --add channels conda-forge
conda config --env --add channels defaults
conda config --env --set channel_priority strict
conda install numpy pip scipy numpy-indexed cython compilers
conda install scikit-fuzzy pandas h5py meshio ruamel.yaml
conda install vtk mpi4py petsc4py
pip install meshplex

This should install all necessary dependencies.

4. Making a development build

Once dependencies are in place, make an in-place build by navigating to the git clone of the gospl repository and running:

python setup.py install

This will install gospl into your environment but allows any further changes without the need of reinstalling new version.

5. Updating the Documentation and User Guide

gospl documentation resides in the docs folder. Changes to the docs are make by modifying the appropriate file within doc. gospl docs us reStructuredText syntax, which is explained here and the docstrings follow the Numpy Docstring standard.

Once you have made your changes, you may try if they render correctly by building the docs using sphinx. To do so, you can navigate to the doc folder and type:

READTHEDOCS=True make clean html

The resulting html pages will be located in doc/build/html. In case of any errors, you can try to use make html within a new environment based on requirements.txt specification in the doc folder.

For minor updates, you can skip whole make html part as reStructuredText syntax is usually quite straightforward.

6. Formatting the code

Python (PEP8 / black)

gospl follows the PEP8 standard and uses Black to ensure a consistent code format throughout the project.

Travis CI will run black --check and fails if there are files which would be auto-formatted by black. Therefore, it is helpful before submitting code to auto-format your code:

black gospl

Additionally, many editors have plugins that will apply black as you edit files. If you don’t have black, you can install it using pip:

pip install black

7. Submitting a Pull Request

Once you’ve made changes and pushed them to your forked repository, you then submit a pull request to have them integrated into the gospl code base.

You can find a pull request (or PR) tutorial in the GitHub’s Help Docs.

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