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Contributing guide

If you are planning to develop pystocktopus, or want to use the latest commit of pystocktopus on your local machine, you might want to install it from the source. This installation is not recommended for users who want to use the stable version of pystocktopus. The steps below describe the installation process of pystocktopus's latest commit. It also describes how to test pystocktopus's codebase and build pystocktopus's documentation.

Installing

We recommend using a virtual environment to install pystocktopus. This would isolate the library from your global Python environment, which would be beneficial for reproducing bugs, and the overall development of pystocktopus. The first step would be to clone pystocktopus -

git clone https://github.com/Akhil-Sharma30/pystocktopus

and then we can change the current working directory and enter pystocktopus -

cd pystocktopus

Creating a virtual environment

A virtual environment can be set up and activated using venv in and Windows systems.

Windows:

python -m venv .tester_dev
.env\bin\activate

Installing pystocktopus

pystocktopus uses modern Python packaging and can be installed using pip -

python -m pip install pystocktopus

The developer installation of pystocktopus comes with a lot of options -

  • test: the test dependencies
  • docs: extra dependencies to build and develop pystocktopus's documentation
  • dev: installs the test and docs dependencies

These options can be used with pip with the editable (-e) mode of installation in the following ways -

pip install -e .[dev,test]

For example, if you want to install the docs dependencies along with the dependencies included above, use -

pip install -e .[dev,test,docs]

Activating pre-commit

pystocktopus uses a set of pre-commit hooks and the pre-commit bot to format, type-check, and prettify the codebase. The hooks can be installed locally using -

pre-commit install

This would run the checks every time a commit is created locally. The checks will only run on the files modified by that commit, but the checks can be triggered for all the files using -

pre-commit run --all-files

If you would like to skip the failing checks and push the code for further discussion, use the --no-verify option with git commit.

Submitting Code

The following is a short list of recommendations. PRs that don't match these criteria won't be closed but it'll be harder to merge the changes into the code.

  • Do stick to PEP8.
  • Do specify a descriptive title to make searching for your pull request easier.
  • Don't leave your pull request description blank.
  • Do license your code as GPLv3.

Also, please submit PRs to the develop branch.

Unit Tests

Do add unit tests if you think it fits. We place our unit tests in the same folder as the code, with the same filename, followed by the _test suffix. So for example: somefile.py will be tested by somefile_test.py.

Please try to read some of the existing unit testing code, so you can see some examples.

Branches Naming Scheme

Do name your branches in accordance with GitFlow. The format is ISSUE_#/BRANCH_NAME; For example, 100/fix-for-pattern or 232/Documentation/add-new-feature.

Testing pystocktopus

pystocktopus is tested with pytest and xdoctest. pytest is responsible for testing the code, whose configuration is available in pyproject.toml, and on the other hand, xdoctest is responsible for testing the examples available in every docstring, which prevents them from going stale. Additionally, pystocktopus also uses pytest-cov to calculate the coverage of these unit tests.

Running tests locally

The tests can be executed using the test dependencies of pystocktopus in the following way -

python -m pytest

Running tests with coverage locally

The coverage value can be obtained while running the tests using pytest-cov in the following way -

python -m pytest --cov=pystocktopus tests/

A much more detailed guide on testing with pytest is available here.

Documenting pystocktopus

pystocktopus's documentation is mainly written in the form of docstrings and Markdown. The docstrings include the description, arguments, examples, return values, and attributes of a class or a function, and the .md files enable us to render this documentation on pystocktopus's documentation website.

pystocktopus primarily uses MkDocs and mkdocstrings for rendering documentation on its website. The configuration file (mkdocs.yml) for MkDocs can be found here. The documentation is deployed on https://readthedocs.io here.

Ideally, with the addition of every new feature to pystocktopus, documentation should be added using comments, docstrings, and .md files.

Building documentation locally

The documentation is located in the docs folder of the main repository. This documentation can be generated using the docs dependencies of pystocktopus in the following way -

mkdocs serve

The commands executed above will clean any existing documentation build, create a new build (in ./site/), and serve it on your localhost. To just build the documentation, use -

mkdocs build

Nox

pystocktopus supports running various critical commands using nox to make them less intimidating for new developers. All of these commands (or sessions in the language of nox) - lint, tests, docs, and build - are defined in noxfile.py.

nox can be installed via pip using -

pip install nox

The default sessions (lint, tests) can be executed using -

nox

Running pre-commit with nox

The pre-commit hooks can be run with nox in the following way -

nox -s lint

Running tests with nox

Tests can be run with nox in the following way -

nox -s tests

Building documentation with nox

Docs can be built with nox in the following way -

nox -s docs

Use the following command if you want to deploy the docs on localhost -

nox -s docs -- serve