Developer quickstart

lsa-program is a free and open source software, contributions are very wellcome and you can start contributing through the common github pattern.

Setting up the development environment

First you need to clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/odarbelaeze/lsa-program.git
# Alternatively you can fork and clone your own fork
git clone https://github.com/<username>/lsa-program.git

Then the most recomendable way for you to do development is in a virtual environment, we will assume that you are familiar with virtualenvwrapper

cd lsa-program
mkvirtualenv -a $PWD -p $(which python3) -r piprequirements.txt lsaenv
pip install -e .  # This command will also install dependencies

Running tests

When contributing to an open source project, it’s crucial that you are able to run its test suite, this project suggests pytest as testing framework and you can use its test runner to run our tests, in order to run our test you need to install testing dependencies, you can do so automatically using the setup.py script

python setup.py test

Otherwise, you could manually install the testing dependencies and run tests manually,

pip install pytest
python -m pytest

Furthermore, you can install pytest plugins such as coverage via the pytest-cov plugin and run the test suite using their custom flags.

Contributing to the code

What you can contribute

You can contribute to the code, not only by adding new features and smashing yourself to the keyboard at the core of the program, some examples of contributions you can make are the following:

• Write documentation
• Write tests, maybe while you are trying to understand what the code does
• Refactor code, here and there there are optimizations that can be made

Otherwise, you can expand the funcionality of th erecord parsers by adding support for more document kinds.

How to contribute

This project supports the feature branch and pull request (PR) way of doing contributions through git, you start by adding a new branch to your repo,

# While in the repo folder
git checkout -b <a-name-that-outlines-your-contribution>
# Do some ground work
git push -u <origin> <a-name-that-outlines-your-contribution>

Then you proced to create the pull request in github, right away, so you can start communicating with the core developers and other members of the community.

Recomendations and code guidelines

Honoring code guidelines is a key part of contributing to a project, that’s because fixing indentation and correcting line lengths is assumed by git as a rewrite, and the authorship of the contributed code might be diluted. This project includes a .editorconfig file that can be used by modern text editors to automatically keep coding guidelines for different filetypes.

Although the code coverage of this project might be low at some point, contributors are encouraged to write tests for their features, and also, regression tests for the code that is already there. Test are writen using pytest which is a very easy to use testing framework, to start you just need to drop a function whos name starts with test_ into one module within the tests folder, and the suite will automatically pick up your testing code.