CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Spyder

👍🎉 First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute to Spyder! 🎉👍

General Guidelines

This page documents at a very high level how to contribute to Spyder. Please check the Spyder IDE Contributor Documentation for a more detailed guide on how to do so.

Troubleshooting

Before posting a report, please carefully read our Troubleshooting Guide and search the issue tracker for your error message and problem description, as the great majority of bugs are either duplicates, or can be fixed on the user side with a few easy steps. Thanks!

Submitting a Helpful Issue

Submitting useful, effective and to-the-point issue reports can go a long way toward improving Spyder for everyone. Accordingly, please read the relevant section of the Spyder Troubleshooting Guide, which describes in detail how to do just that.

Most importantly, aside from the error message/traceback and the requested environment/dependency information, please be sure you include a detailed, step by step description of exactly what triggered the problem. Otherwise, we likely won't be able to find and fix it, and your issue will have to be closed after a week (7 days). Thanks!

Setting Up a Development Environment

Cloning the repo

  $ git clone https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder.git

Creating a conda environment or virtualenv

If you use Anaconda you can create a conda environment with the following commands:

  $ conda create -n spyder-dev python=3
  $ source activate spyder-dev

On Windows, you'll want to run the commands with the Anaconda Prompt, and use just activate spyder-dev for the second command.

You can also use virtualenv on Linux, but conda is strongly recommended:

  $ mkvirtualenv spyder-dev
  $ workon spyder-dev

Installing dependencies

After you have created your development environment, you need to install Spyder's necessary dependencies. The easiest way to do so (with Anaconda) is

  $ conda install spyder
  $ conda remove spyder

This installs all of Spyder's dependencies into the environment along with the stable/packaged version of Spyder itself, and then removes the latter.

If using pip and virtualenv (not recommended), you need to cd to the directory where your git clone is stored and run:

  $ pip install -r requirements/requirements.txt

If you are using pip and Python 3, you also need to install a Qt binding package (PyQt5). This can be achieved by running:

  $ pip install pyqt5

Running Spyder

To start Spyder directly from your clone, i.e. without installing it into your environment, you need to run (from the directory you cloned it to e.g. spyder):

  $ python bootstrap.py

To start Spyder in debug mode, useful for tracking down an issue, you can run:

  $ python bootstrap.py --debug

Important Note: To test any changes you've made to the Spyder source code, you need to restart Spyder or start a fresh instance (you can run multiple copies simultaneously by unchecking the Preferences option Use a single instance under General > Advanced Settings .

Spyder Branches

When you start to work on a new pull request (PR), you need to be sure that your work is done on top of the correct Spyder branch, and that you base your PR on Github against it.

To guide you, issues on Github are marked with a milestone that indicates the correct branch to use. If not, follow these guidelines:

• Use the 3.x branch for bugfixes only (e.g. milestones v3.2.1, v3.2.2, or v3.2.3)
• Use master to introduce new features or break compatibility with previous Spyder versions (e.g. milestones v4.0beta1 or v4.0beta2).

You should also submit bugfixes to 3.x or master for errors that are only present in those respective branches.

To start working on a new PR, you need to execute these commands, filling in the branch names where appropriate:

  $ git checkout <SPYDER-BASE-BRANCH>
  $ git pull upstream <SPYDER-BASE-BRANC>
  $ git checkout -b NAME-NEW-BRANCH

Changing the base branch

If you started your work in the wrong base branch, or want to backport it, you can change the base branch using git rebase --onto, like this:

  $ git rebase --onto <NEW-BASE-BRANCH> <OLD-BASE-BRANCH> <YOUR-BRANCH>

For example, backporting my_branch from master to 3.x:

  $ git rebase --onto 3.x master my_branch

Running Tests

To install our test dependencies under Anaconda:

  $ conda install --file requirements/test_requirements.txt -c spyder-ide

If using pip (for experts only), run the following from the directory where your git clone is stored:

  $ pip install -r requirements/test_requirements.txt

To run the Spyder test suite, please use (from the spyder root directory):

  $ python runtests.py

More information

Main Website

Download Spyder (with Anaconda)

Spyder Github

Troubleshooting Guide and FAQ

Development Wiki

Gitter Chatroom

Google Group

@Spyder_IDE on Twitter

@SpyderIDE on Facebook

Support Spyder on OpenCollective