Development guide#

This page provides procedures and guidelines for developing and contributing to Safir.

Scope of contributions#

Safir is an open source package, meaning that you can contribute to Safir itself, or fork Safir for your own purposes.

Since Safir is intended for internal use by Rubin Observatory, community contributions can only be accepted if they align with Rubin Observatory’s aims. For that reason, it’s a good idea to propose changes with a new GitHub issue before investing time in making a pull request.

Safir is developed by the LSST SQuaRE team.

Setting up a local development environment#

To develop Safir, create a virtual environment with your method of choice (like virtualenvwrapper) and then clone or fork, and install:

git clone https://github.com/lsst-sqre/safir.git
cd safir
make init

This init step does three things:

  1. Installs Safir in an editable mode with its “dev” extra that includes test and documentation dependencies.

  2. Installs pre-commit and tox.

  3. Installs the pre-commit hooks.

You must have Docker installed and configured so that your user can start Docker containers in order to run the test suite.

Pre-commit hooks#

The pre-commit hooks, which are automatically installed by running the make init command on set up, ensure that files are valid and properly formatted. Some pre-commit hooks automatically reformat code:

seed-isort-config

Adds configuration for isort to the pyproject.toml file.

isort

Automatically sorts imports in Python modules.

black

Automatically formats Python code.

blacken-docs

Automatically formats Python code in reStructuredText documentation and docstrings.

When these hooks fail, your Git commit will be aborted. To proceed, stage the new modifications and proceed with your Git commit.

Running tests#

To test the library, run tox, which tests the library the same way that the CI workflow does:

tox

To see a listing of test environments, run:

tox -av

tox will start a PostgreSQL container, which is required for some tests.

To run a specific test or list of tests, you can add test file names (and any other pytest options) after -- when executing the py tox environment. For example:

tox -e py -- tests/database_test.py

Building documentation#

Documentation is built with Sphinx:

tox -e docs

The build documentation is located in the docs/_build/html directory.

Updating the change log#

Each pull request should update the change log (CHANGELOG.md). Add a description of new features and fixes as list items under a section at the top of the change log, using unreleased for the date portion. The version number for that heading should be chosen or updated based on the semver rules.

## X.Y.Z (unreleased)

### Subheading (see below)

- Description of the feature or fix.

All changelog entries should be divided into sections (each starting with ###) chosen from the following:

  • Backward-incompatible changes (also increase the major version except in unusual cases)

  • New features (also increase the minor version except in unusual cases)

  • Bug fixes

  • Other changes (which are mostly new features that are not significant enough to call attention to, such as logging formatting changes or updates to the documentation)

If the exact version and release date is known (because a release is being prepared), the section header is formatted as:

## X.Y.Z (YYYY-MM-DD)

Each entry in the change log should be on one line without line breaks, even though this violates the normal rule of putting a newline after each sentence. This allows the whole change log entry to be copied and pasted into the GitHub release page when creating a release. Unfortunately, GitHub Markdown preserves line breaks after sentences as hard line breaks when rendering the description of a release.

Style guide#

Code#

  • The code style follows PEP 8, though in practice lean on Black and isort to format the code for you.

  • Use PEP 484 type annotations. The tox -e typing test environment, which runs mypy, ensures that the project’s types are consistent.

  • Write tests for Pytest.

Documentation#