contributing.md

Contributing to arms

This document contains guidelines for contributing to arms, as well as useful hints when doing so.

Table of contents:

• Useful utilities
  • Running tests
  • Useful websites
• Style conventions

Useful utilities

Running tests

arms uses the command line tool tox to run its tests for the purpose of:

• making sure that the file setup.py is configured properly so that the final distribution can be successfully installed under the environment of Python 3.6;
• making sure that arms runs properly by calling the unit test framework pytest, which takes the test cases in the folder tests/ in the root directory into account.

In addition the plugin pytest-cov is installed to calculate the test coverage. When working on this project the default test suite can be easily run with the command

  $ tox

For the reason that by now arms only requires Python 3.6 it can be convenient to set up a local virtual environment and installing arms in it by following the steps:

  # Navigate to the GitHub folder.
  $ cd to/GitHub/

  # Create a virtual environment called 'virtual'
  $ virtualenv -p python virtual

  # Activate the virtual environment.
  $ source virtual/bin/activate

  # Install arms in 'editable' mode.
  $ pip install -e ./arms/

, where $ python is referring to Python 3.6. Then, the tests can be run by calling

  $ cd to/GitHub/arms
  $ pytest --cov=arms tests/

Useful websites

Some handy resources:

• The Python Standard Library

Style conventions

The coding conventions of this project are based on PEP8. Because its following is not controlled by Travis CI it is recommended to use an editor with a respective checker like PyCharm.