Contributing¶

Welcome to the Merlin developer documentation! This section provides instructions for contributing to Merlin.

Getting Started¶

Follow the Getting Started documentation to setup your Merlin development environment.

Once your development is setup create a branch:

$ git checkout -b feature/<username>/description

Note

Other common types of branches besides feature are: bugfix, hotfix, or refactor.

Select the branch type that best represents the development.

Merlin follows a gitflow workflow. Updates to the develop branch are made via pull requests.

This section provides Merlin’s guide for contributing features/bugfixes to Merlin.

Warning

All pull requests must pass make tests prior to consideration!

To expedite review, please ensure that pull requests

Are from a meaningful branch name (e.g. feature/my_name/cool_thing)
Are being merged into the appropriate branch
Include testing for any new features
- unit tests in tests/unit
- integration tests in tests/integration
Include descriptions of the changes
- a summary in the pull request
- details in CHANGELOG.md
Ran make fix-style to adhere to style guidelines
Pass make tests; output included in pull request
Increment version number appropriately
- in CHANGELOG.md
- in merlin.__init__.py
Have squashed commits

All pull requests must pass unit and integration tests. To ensure that they do run

$ make tests

This section documents Merlin’s style guide. Unless otherwise specified, PEP-8 is the preferred coding style and PEP-0257 for docstrings.

Note

make fix-style will automatically fix any style issues.

Merlin has style checkers configured. They can be run from the Makefile:

$ make check-style