Contributing

All contributions, bug reports, bug fixes, documentation improvements, enhancements, and ideas are welcome. We recommend going through the issues to find issues that interest you. Then, you can get your development environment setup with the following instructions.

Forking Pyomeca

You will need your own fork to work on the code. Go to the pyomeca project page and hit the Fork button. You will want to clone your fork to your machine:

git clone https://github.com/your-user-name/pyomeca.git
cd pyomeca
git remote add upstream https://github.com/pyomeca/pyomeca.git

Creating a Python environment

Before starting any development, you’ll need to create an isolated pyomeca development environment:

• Install miniconda
• cd to the pyomeca source directory
• Install pyomeca dependencies with:

conda env create
conda activate pyomeca
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Creating a branch

You want your master branch to reflect only production-ready code, so create a feature branch for making your changes. For example:

git branch -b new-feature

Keep any changes in this branch specific to one bug or feature so it is clear what the branch brings to pyomeca.

Testing your code

Adding tests is required if you add or modify existing codes in pyomeca. Therefore, it is worth getting in the habit of writing tests ahead of time so this is never an issue. The pyomeca test suite runs automatically on GitHub Actions, once your pull request is submitted. However, we strongly encourage running the tests prior to submitting the pull request. To do so, run make test or simply pytest tests.

Linting your code

Pyomeca uses several tools to ensure a consistent code format throughout the project. The easiest way to use them is to run make lint from the source directory.

Making the pull-request

When you want your changes to appear publicly on your GitHub page, push your forked feature branch’s commits:

git push origin new-feature

If everything looks good, you are ready to make a pull request. This pull request and its associated changes will eventually be committed to the master branch and available in the next release.

1. Navigate to your repository on GitHub
2. Click on the Pull Request button
3. You can then click on Files Changed to make sure everything looks OK
4. Write a description of your changes in the Discussion tab
5. Click Send Pull Request

This request then goes to the repository maintainers, and they will review the code. If you need to make more changes, you can make them in your branch, add them to a new commit and push them to GitHub. The pull request will be automatically updated.