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Contributing to PyLabRobot

Thank you for your interest in contributing to PyLabRobot! This document will help you get started.

Getting Started

See the installation instructions here. For contributing, you should install PyLabRobot from source.

If this is your first time contributing to open source, check out How to Open Source for an easy introduction.

It's highly appreciated by the PyLabRobot developers if you communicate what you want to work on, to minimize any duplicate work. You can do this on the forum.

Development Tips

It is recommend that you use VSCode, as we provide a workspace config in /.vscode/settings.json, but you can use any editor you like, of course.

Some VSCode Extensions I'd recommend:

Testing

PyLabRobot uses pytest to run unit tests. Please make sure tests pass when you submit a PR. You can run tests as follows.

make test # run test on the latest version

pylint is used to enforce code style. The rc file is /.pylintrc. As mentioned above, it is very helpful to have an editor do style checking as you're writing code.

make lint

mypy is used to enforce type checking.

make typecheck

Writing documentation

It is important that you write documentation for your code. As a rule of thumb, all functions and classes, whether public or private, are required to have a docstring. PyLabRobot uses Google Style Python Docstrings. In addition, PyLabRobot uses type hints to document the types of variables.

To build the documentation, run make docs in the root directory. The documentation will be built in docs/_build/html. Run open docs/_build/html/index.html to open the documentation in your browser.

Common Tasks

Fixing a bug

Bug fixes are an easy way to get started contributing.

Make sure you write a test that fails before your fix and passes after your fix. This ensures that this bug will never occur again. Tests are written in <filename>_tests.py files. See Python's unittest module and existing tests for more information. In most cases, adding a few additional lines to an existing test should be sufficient.

Adding resources

If you have defined a new resource, it is highly appreciated by the community if you add them to the repo. In most cases, a partial function is enough. There are many examples, like tipracks.py. If you are writing a new kind of resource, you should probably subclass resource in a new file.

Make sure to add your file to the imports in __init__.py of your resources package.

Writing a new backend

Backends are the primary objects used to communicate with hardware. If you want to integrate a new piece of hardware into PyLabRobot, writing a new backend is the way to go. Here's, very generally, how you'd do it:

  1. Copy the pylabrobot/liquid_handling/backends/backend.py file to a new file, and rename the class to <BackendName>Backend.
  2. Remove all abc (abstract base class) imports and decorators from the class.
  3. Implement the methods in the class.

Support

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out using the PyLabRobot forum.