Contribute

Workflow

If you start working on a new feature or a fix, please create an issue on GitHub shortly describing the issue and assign yourself. Your startpoint should always be the develop branch, which contains the lastest updates.

Create an own branch or fork, on which you can implement your changes. To get your work merged, please:

  1. create a pull request to the develop branch with a meaningful summary,

  2. check that code changes are covered by tests, and all tests pass,

  3. check that the documentation is up-to-date,

  4. request a code review from the main developers.

Environment

If you contribute to the development of pyABC, install developer requirements via:

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Pre-commit hooks

First, this installs a pre-commit tool. To add those hooks to the .git folder of your local clone such that they are run on every commit, run:

pre-commit install

When adding new hooks, consider manually running pre-commit run --all-files once as usually only the diff is checked. The configuration is specified in .pre-commit-config.yaml.

Tox

Second, this installs the virtual testing tool tox, which we use for all tests, format and quality checks. Its configuration is specified in tox.ini. To run it locally, simply execute:

tox [-e flake8,doc]

with optional -e options specifying the environments to run, see tox.ini for details.

Extra dependencies

Not all dependencies in particular of tests and documentation are managed via tox, e.g. installations of R and Julia, pandoc, and AMICI dependencies. To set these up locally, see e.g. .github/workflows/ci.yml and .github/workflows/install_deps.sh (which can also be invoked locally) on how these are installed on GitHub Actions.

GitHub Actions

For automatic continuous integration testing, we use GitHub Actions. All tests are run there on pull requests and required to pass. The configuration is specified in .github/workflows/ci.yml.

Documentation

To make pyabc easily usable, we try to provide good documentation, including code annotation and usage examples. The documentation is hosted at pyabc.readthedocs.io and updated automatically on merges to the main branches. To create the documentation locally, first install the requirements via:

pip install .[doc]

and then compile the documentation via:

cd doc
make html

The documentation is then under doc/_build.

Alternatively, the documentation can be compiled and tested via a single command:

tox -e doc

When adding code, all modules, classes, functions, parameters, code blocks should be properly documented.

For docstrings, we follow the numpy docstring standard. Check here for a detailed explanation.

Unit tests

Unit tests are located in the test folder. All files starting with test_ contain tests and are automatically run on GitHub Actions. Run them locally via e.g.:

tox -e base

with base covering basic tests, but some parts (external,petab,...) are in separate subfolders. Some dependencies are not managed via tox, see the above Environment section.

Tox basically mostly executes pytest on subsets of the tests, e.g.:

pytest test/base

pytest (install via pip install pytest) can also be invoked directly like this, but may then require various further dependencies, see the environments in tox.ini.

Unit tests can be written with pytest or unittest.

Code changes should always be covered by unit tests. It might not always be easy to test code which is based on random sampling, but we still encourage general sanity and integration tests. We highly encourage a test-driven development style.

PEP8

We try to respect the PEP8 coding standards. We run flake8 as part of the tests. The flake8 plugins used are specified in tox.ini and the flake8 configuration is given in .flake8. You can run the checks locally via:

tox -e flake8

Data store migration

For how the pyABC storage works, see the pages in the Data store User documentation and the Data store API documentation. In general, we try to keep the storage format as consistent as possible.

If changes are necessary, after all implementations the dataformat version in pyabc/storage/version.py should be incremented. All newly created databases are annotated with this version.

To update outdated databases to the new format, we want to provide migration routines. We use Alembic to migrate our SQLAlchemy based databases. Install it via:

pip install pyabc[migrate]

Its configuration is given in pyabc/storage/alembic.ini.

Then, prepare the migration scripts by running inside the pyabc.storage folder:

alembic revision --rev-id VERSION -m 'SHORT CHANGE DESCRIPTION'

where VERSION is the new version in pyabc/storage/version.py.

This creates a new subfolder under pyabc/storage/migrations/versions with two functions upgrade() and downgrade() to be manually filled with the necessary database changes. See the Alembic and SQLAlchemy documentation for details.

Users will then migrate databases via abc-migrate, pointing to pyabc/storage/migrate.py:migrate, which is a wrapper around alembic upgrade head.

Adding tests for correct conversions is recommended.