3Pillar Open-Source Guidelines

This document aims to provide some simple guidelines for publishing projects under an Open-Source License.

Checklist

• doulecheck code for credentials (including history)
• pick a license
• provide a README
• building instructions
• tests and instructions on how to run them
• code style

Credentials

Make sure you don't have any passwords, api keys, etc. in your codebase. This includes past commits.

If you do, and are willing to sacrifice codebase history, you can always start a fresh repo and copy over your code.

Alternatively you can use git rebase --interactive to rewrite past commits.

Picking a license

Simply pushing something to a Github public repo doesn't make it Open-Source. You need to explicitly add a license to your project.

Providing a README

What is this project about? Who should use it? What are the steps to contribute to this project?

Building Instructions

Should be contained in a INSTALL file and should provide detailed

Development practices

• Provide information on how to run the testsuite.
• Consider using Travis-CI to get Continuous Integration for your project.
• Consider using github's pull request system to code review and integrate proposed patches
• Make sure you have (preferable annotated) tags for stable releases
• When uploading for the first time an existing project to github, try to preserve the existing history as much as possible
• Have responsible for each project which can integrate pull requests

Code Style

Try to use a recognized style for the programming language

• Python - PEP8