Development

Development for SLUGS is open to all contributors. Use the information provided here to inform your contributions and help the project maintainers review and accept your work.

Getting Started

File a new issue on the project issue tracker on GitHub describing the work you intend on doing. Provide as much information on your feature request as possible.

The issue number for your new issue should be included at the end of the commit message of each patch related to that issue.

If you simply want to request a new feature but do not intend on working on it, file your issue as normal and the project maintainers will triage it for future work.

Writing Code

New code should be written in its own Git branch, ideally branched from HEAD on master. If other commits are merged into master after your branch was created, be sure to rebase your work on the current state of master before submitting a pull request to GitHub.

New code should generally follow PEP 8 style guidelines, though there are exceptions that will be allowed in special cases. Run the flake8 tests to check your code before submitting a pull request (see Running Tests).

To prepare your local Python environment for SLUGS development, install the project requirements:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Writing Documentation

Like new code, new documentation should be written in its own Git branch. All SLUGS documentation is written in RST format and managed using sphinx. It can be found under docs/source.

If you are interested in contributing to the project documentation, install the project documentation requirements:

$ pip install -r doc-requirements.txt

To build the documentation, navigate into the docs directory and run:

$ make html

This will build the SLUGS documentation as HTML and place it under the new docs/build/html directory. View it using your preferred web browser.

Commit Messages

Commit messages should include a single line title (75 characters max) followed by a blank line and a description of the change, including feature details, testing and documentation updates, feature limitations, known issues, etc.

The issue number for the issue associated with the commit should be included at the end of the commit message, if it exists. If the commit is the final one for a specific issue, use Closes #XXX or Fixes #XXX to link the issue and close it simultaneously.

Bug Fixes

If you have found a bug in SLUGS, file a new issue and use the title format Bug: <brief description here>. In the body of the issue please provide as much information as you can, including Python version, SLUGS version, operating system version, and any stacktraces or logging information produced by SLUGS related to the bug. See What to put in your bug report for a breakdown of bug reporting best practices.

If you are working on a bug fix for a bug in master, follow the general guidelines above for branching and code development (see Writing Code).

If you are working on a bug fix for an older version of SLUGS, your branch should be based on the latest commit of the repository branch for the version of SLUGS the bug applies to (e.g., branch release-1.0.0 for SLUGS 1.0). The pull request for your bug fix should also target the version branch in question. If applicable, it will be pulled forward to newer versions of SLUGS, up to and including master.

Running Tests

SLUGS uses tox to manage testing across multiple Python versions. Test infrastructure currently supports Python 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6. Additional test environments are provided for security, style, and documentation checks.

Note

All of the tox commands discussed in this section should be run from the root of the SLUGS repository, in the same directory as the tox.ini configuration file.

The style checks leverage flake8 and can be run like so:

$ tox -e pep8

The security checks use bandit and can be run like so:

$ tox -e bandit

The documentation checks leverage sphinx to build the HTML documentation in a temporary directory, verifying that there are no errors. These checks can be run like so:

$ tox -e docs

To run the above checks along with the entire unit test suite, simple run tox without any arguments.

$ tox

Unit Tests

The unit test suite tests each individual component of the SLUGS code base, verifying that each component works correctly in isolation. Ideal code coverage would include the entire code base. To facilitate improving coverage, test coverage results are included with each Python unit test environment.

To test against a specific Python version (e.g., Python 2.7), run:

$ tox -e py27

Integration Tests

The integration test suite tests the REST API provided by SLUGS, verifying that the right response data and response status codes are returned for specific queries. An instance of SLUGS must already be running and serving the examples/user_group_mapping.csv data file for the integration test cases to pass.

Code base coverage is not a goal of the integration test suite. Code coverage statistics are therefore not included in the output of the integration tests. For code coverage, run the unit tests above.

To run the integration test suite, the URL to the SLUGS instance must be passed to the test suite using the --url configuration argument. Assuming the SLUGS URL is http://127.0.0.1:8080/slugs, the following tox command will set up and execute the integration tests:

$ tox -r -e integration -- --url http://127.0.0.1:8080/slugs

For more information on the testing tools used here, see the following resources: