Please open issues to discuss enhancements and bugs that you may encounter with libNeuroML. Pull requests with enhancements and bug fixes are welcome.
It is best to use virtual environments when developing Python packages. This ensures that one uses a clean environment that includes the necessary dependencies and does not affect the overall system installation.
For quick development, consider using editable installs.
The dependencies are broken down in the setup.cfg
file. To get a complete development environment, one can run:
pip install -e .[dev] # an editable install with all development dependecies installed
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The source code uses spaces, and each tab is equivalent to 4 spaces.
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We use the reStructuredText (reST) format for Python docstrings. Please document your code when opening pull requests. All methods/functions/modules must include docstrings that explain the parameters.
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We use ruff to format and lint our code. (See the section on pre-commit below.)
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Please use type hints wherever applicable. You can set up type checkers such as mypy to use type hints in your development environment/IDE.
pip install mypy
A number of pre-commit hooks are used to improve code-quality. Please run the following code to set up the pre-commit hooks:
$ pre-commit install
The hooks will be run at each git commit
.
Please see .pre-commit-config.yaml
for information on what hooks we run.
Writing good commit messages makes things easy to follow. Please see these posts:
- How to write a Git commit message
- While not compulsory, we prefer conventional commits
Bug fixes and new features should include unit tests to test for correctness.
One can base new tests off the current ones included in the tests/
directory.
To see how tests are run, please see the GitHub Actions configuration file.
We use pytest for unit testing. One can run it from the root of the repository:
pytest
To run specific tests, one can use the -k
flag:
pytest -k "..."
- Please contribute pull requests against the
development
branch. - Please ensure that the automated build for your pull request passes.
- Please write good commit messages (see the section above).
Over time, as pull requests are reviewed, the development
branch continues to move on with other changes.
Sometimes, it can be useful/necessary to pull in these changes to the pull request branch, using the following steps.
Add the upstream libNeuroML repository as a remote:
git remote add upstream https://github.com/NeuralEnsemble/libNeuroML.git
Update your local copy of the development
branch, and the remote copy in your fork:
git checkout development
git pull upstream development
git push
Pull in changes from development to your branch:
git checkout <feature branch being used for PR>
git merge development
If there are merge conflicts, you will need to resolve these, since merging the feature branch in the pull request will also result in these. After any merge conflicts have been resolved (or if there aren't any), you can push your branch to your fork to update the pull request:
git push