Contributing

Contributions to Firecrown are welcome.

For any contribution, please start by opening a discussion. We are intending to use GitHub discussions to come to a consensus on the ideas for new additions. Once a consensus is reached, we will convert the discussion into a GitHub issue that can be used to track the progress of the work.

New development for issues should be done on a branch. To create a branch you will need write access; if you don’t have write access, please send a request to the @LSSTDESC/firecrown-devs team. You can also fork the repository and send a pull request from your fork.

When you have completed the task, push your commits to the branch you created for the issue and create a pull request.

We are using several tools to help keep the code tidy and correct; these are described below. These tools are all applied by the continuous integration (CI) system that is run on every pull request.

Type checking

We are using type-hinting in (most of) the code, to help ensure correct use of the framework. We are using mypy to verify the code is conforming to these type hints. Please run:

mypy -p firecrown -p examples -p tests

and fix any errors reported before pushing commits to the GitHub repository.

Testing

Warning

We are working on improving the coverage of testing for Firecrown; it is currently inadequate. As the coverage improves, we will provide instructions for writing tests for new code.

We are using pytest to run tests on Firecrown. To run the same set of tests that will be run by the CI system, use:

python -m pytest

Use of pylint

We are using pylint to check for a variety of possible problems. pylint is run in the CI system with the following flags:

pylint firecrown
pylint --rcfile tests/pylintrc  tests
pylint --rcfile firecrown/models/pylintrc firecrown/models

Code formatting

We are using the command-line tool black to auto-format Python code in Firecrown. Please make sure to run black on your code before creating any commits.

black firecrown examples tests