Contributing

All contributions are welcome!

In order to ease the start for you to contribute, please follow these guidelines.

Please note: Pynguin development currently takes place on a private repository. Our public GitHub repository just serves as a mirror of released versions. If you are interested in contributing to Pynguin please contact use beforehand.

Dependencies

We use poetry to manage the dependencies If you do not have poetry installed, you should run the command below:

make download-poetry

To install dependencies and prepare pre-commit hooks you would need to run the install command:

make install

To activate your virtualenv run poetry shell. We refer you to the documentation of poetry for further details on the tool.

Git Development Workflow

Note: Our internal development takes place in a private repository thus this information is related to this repository.

To contribute to Pynguin, we ask you to create an issue and a related merge request. Commit and push your changes to the merge request. The changes will run through our continuous-integration system as well as through manual code review. Once all checks pass and the changes were approved, we’ll merge them into our main branch.

Code Style

After you run make install you can execute the automatic code formating:

make codestyle

We require the ruff-format code style, with 100 characters per line maximum width (exceptions are only permitted for imports and comments that disable, e.g., a linter warning). Imports are ordered using isort. Docstrings shall conform to the Google Python Style Guide. Except from the above-mentioned differences, we suggest to conform the the Google Python Style Guide as much as possible.

In particular, we want to point to Sec. 2.14 of Google’s style guide, regarding None checks.

Import from __future__ are not permitted except for the from __future__ import annotations feature that allows more concise type hints. Pynguin requires at least Python 3.10—there is not need to support older versions here!

Checks

Many checks are configured for this project. The command make check will run ruff-format diffs, docstring style checks and mypy. The make check-safety command will look at the security of our code.

Note: Some checks on Windows only run in git bash or the Linux subsystem.

You can also use the STRICT=1 flag to make the check be strict.

We use the following tools and checks:

Before Submitting

Before submitting your code please do the following steps:

  1. Add any changes you want

  2. Add tests for the new changes (can be done vice versa of course, if you follow the TDD principles, which we highly recommend to do)

  3. Edit documentation if you have changed something significant

  4. Run make check and fix all complaints by the automated checks before you commit and push your changes

Unit Tests

Pynguin uses pytest to execute the tests. You can find the tests in the tests folder. The target make test executes pytest with the appropriate parameters.

We prefer a test-driven development style, which allows us to have tests in a natural way when developing some new functionality.

To combine all analysis tools and the test execution we provide the target make check, which executes all of them in a row.

Development using PyCharm

If you want to use the PyCharm IDE you have to set up a few things:

  1. Import Pynguin into PyCharm.

  2. Find the location of the virtual environment by running poetry env info in the project directory.

  3. Go to Settings/Project: pynguin/Project interpreter

  4. Add and use an existing interpreter that points to the path of the virtual environment

  5. Set the default test runner to pytest

  6. Set the docstrings format to Google