CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing code

Note: This document is based on the contribution guidelines for scikit-learn.

How to contribute

0. Read the part of the documentation that provides an overview of the SKLL codebase, run the tutorial and examples, and get familiar with the SKLL outputs.

1. Fork the project repository: click on the 'Fork' button near the top of the page. This creates a copy of the code under your account on the GitHub server. (NOTE: If you are officially on the SKLL Developers team, you should not fork; just clone the SKLL repository directly.)

2. Clone the fork (or the main repo) to your local disk:

      $ git clone git@github.com:YourLogin/skll.git
      $ cd skll
   

3. Create an isolated environment for SKLL development. We recommend using the conda package manager. To create a conda environment, run the following command in the root of the working directory:

     $ conda create -n sklldev -c conda-forge --file requirements.dev python=3.11
   

4. Activate the conda environment

     $ conda activate sklldev
   

5. Run pip install -e . to install skll into the environment in editable mode, which is what we need for development.

6. Install pre-commit for automatically running git commit hooks:

     $ pre-commit install
   

   pre-commit is used to run pre-commit hooks, such as isort and flake8. (Check here to see a full list of pre-commit hooks.) If you attempt to make a commit and it fails, you will be able to see which hooks passed/failed and you will have an opportunity to commit suggested changes and/or address problems.

   If you want to run all checks or specific checks before attempting a commit, it is possible to do. It is also possible to skip checks altogether (though this should be done only when well-motivated).

   To run all checks on all files (not just those that have changed):

     $ pre-commit run --all-files
   

   To run all hooks on changed files:

     $ pre-commit run
   

   To run the black hook alone on changed files:

     $ pre-commit run black
   

   To run the black hook alone on a given file:

     $ pre-commit run black <file-path>
   

   Finally, the SKIP environment variable can be used to indicate to pre-commit that certain checks should be skipped. It can be assigned a comma-separated list of check names:

     $ SKIP=check-added-large-files git commit -m "Adding a large file that we definitely need"
   

7. Create a feature branch to hold your changes:

      $ git checkout -b feature/my-new-addition
   

   and start making changes. Never work in the main branch!

8. During development, you can stage and commit your changes in git as follows:

      $ git add modified_files
      $ git commit
   

   Make sure to read step 6 above concerning pre-commit hooks.

9. Once you are done with your changes (including any new tests), run the tests locally:

     $ nose2 -s tests
   

10. After making sure all tests pass, you are ready to push your branch/fork to GitHub with:

      $ git push -u origin feature/my-new-addition
    

Finally, go to the web page of (your fork of) the SKLL repo, and click 'Pull request' to send your changes to the maintainers for review.

(If any of the above seems like magic to you, then look up the Git documentation on the web.)

We recommended that you check that your contribution complies with the following rules before submitting a pull request:

• All methods and functions should have informative docstrings.

• All existing tests should pass when everything is rebuilt from scratch. You should be able to see this by running nose2 -s tests locally, or looking at the Gitlab CI build status after you create your pull request.

• All new functionality must be covered by unit tests.

• Every pull request description should contain a link to the issue that it is trying to address. This is easily done by just typing # and then picking the issue from the dropdown. If the issue is not visible in the first set of results, type a few characters from the issue title and the dropdown should update.

• Address any PEP8 issues pointed out by the pep8speaks bot that comments on your PR after you submit it. The same comment will update after you make make any further commits so refer to it after every commit. You may want to install a linter in your development environment so that you can fix any PEP8 issues while you write your code. We generally ignore E501 messages about lines longer than 100 characters.

• You may need to add new tests if the code coverage after merging your branch will be lower than the current main. This will be reported by the codecov bot once you submit your PR.

After submitting a pull request, it is recommended to add at least 2-3 reviewers to review it. See Requesting a pull request review for more details.

Easy Issues

A great way to start contributing to SKLL is to pick an item from the list of issues labelled with the good first issue tag. Resolving these issues allow you to start contributing to the project without much prior knowledge. Your assistance in this area will be greatly appreciated by the more experienced developers as it helps free up their time to concentrate on other issues.

Large Issues

If you are willing, there are often issues that are not incredibly complex, but still take more time than the main developers have had time to address them. Any help with these issues would be greatly appreciated. They are labelled with the help wanted tag on the issue list.

Documentation

We are glad to accept any sort of documentation: function docstrings, reStructuredText documents (like this one), tutorials, etc. reStructuredText documents live in the source code repository under the doc/ directory.

You can edit the documentation using any text editor and then generate the HTML output by typing make html from the doc/ directory. Alternatively, make can be used to quickly generate the documentation without the example gallery. The resulting HTML files will be placed in _build/html/ and are viewable in a web browser. See the README file in the doc/ directory for more information.

For building the documentation, you will need sphinx as well as the readthedocs sphinx theme. To install both, just run:

  $ conda install 'sphinx<6' sphinx_rtd_theme==1.2.0

in your existing conda environment.