Contributing

Contributions are highly welcomed and appreciated. Every little help counts, so do not hesitate!

Types of contributions

Report bugs

Report bugs at https://bitbucket.org/hpk42/pytest/issues.

If you are reporting a bug, please include:

• Your operating system name and version.
• Any details about your local setup that might be helpful in troubleshooting, specifically Python interpreter version, installed libraries and pytest version.
• Detailed steps to reproduce the bug.

Submit feedback for developers

Do you like pytest? Share some love on Twitter or in your blog posts!

We’d also like to hear about your propositions and suggestions. Feel free to submit them as issues and:

• Set the “kind” to “enhancement” or “proposal” so that we can quickly find about them.
• Explain in detail how they should work.
• Keep the scope as narrow as possible. This will make it easier to implement.
• If you have required skills and/or knowledge, we are very happy for pull requests.

Fix bugs

Look through the BitBucket issues for bugs. Here is sample filter you can use: https://bitbucket.org/hpk42/pytest/issues?status=new&status=open&kind=bug

Talk to developers to find out how you can fix specific bugs.

Implement features

Look through the BitBucket issues for enhancements. Here is sample filter you can use: https://bitbucket.org/hpk42/pytest/issues?status=new&status=open&kind=enhancement

Talk to developers to find out how you can implement specific features.

Write documentation

pytest could always use more documentation. What exactly is needed?

• More complementary documentation. Have you perhaps found something unclear?
• Documentation translations. We currently have English and Japanese versions.
• Docstrings. There’s never too much of them.
• Blog posts, articles and such – they’re all very appreciated.

Preparing Pull Requests on Bitbucket

Note

What is a “pull request”? It informs project’s core developers about the changes you want to review and merge. Pull requests are stored on BitBucket servers. Once you send pull request, we can discuss it’s potential modifications and even add more commits to it later on.

The primary development platform for pytest is BitBucket. You can find all the issues there and submit your pull requests.

1. Fork the pytest BitBucket repository. It’s fine to use pytest as your fork repository name because it will live under your user.

2. Create and activate a fork-specific virtualenv (http://www.virtualenv.org/en/latest/):

   $ virtualenv pytest-venv
   $ source pytest-venv/bin/activate

3. Clone your fork locally using Mercurial (hg) and create a branch:

   $ hg clone ssh://hg@bitbucket.org/YOUR_BITBUCKET_USERNAME/pytest
   $ cd pytest
   $ hg branch your-branch-name

   If you need some help with Mercurial, follow this quick start guide: http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/QuickStart

4. You can now edit your local working copy. To test you need to install the “tox” tool into your virtualenv:

   $ pip install tox

You need to have Python 2.7 and 3.3 available in your system. Now running tests is as simple as issuing this command:

$ python runtox.py -e py27,py33,flakes

This command will run tests via the “tox” tool against Python 2.7 and 3.3 and also perform “flakes” coding-style checks. runtox.py is a thin wrapper around tox which installs from a development package index where newer (not yet released to pypi) versions of dependencies (especially py) might be present.

To run tests on py27 and pass options (e.g. enter pdb on failure) to pytest you can do:

$ python runtox.py -e py27 -- --pdb

or to only run tests in a particular test module on py33:

$ python runtox.py -e py33 -- testing/test_config.py

5. Commit and push once your tests pass and you are happy with your change(s):

   $ hg commit -m"<commit message>"
   $ hg push -b .

6. Finally, submit a pull request through the BitBucket website:

source: YOUR_BITBUCKET_USERNAME/pytest
branch: your-branch-name

target: hpk42/pytest
branch: default

What about git (and so GitHub)?

There used to be the pytest GitHub mirror. It was removed in favor of the Mercurial one, to remove confusion of people not knowing where it’s better to put their issues and pull requests. Also it wasn’t easily possible to automate the mirroring process.

However, it’s still possible to use git to contribute to pytest using tools like gitifyhg which allows you to clone and work with Mercurial repo still using git.

Warning

Remember that git is not a default version control system for pytest and you need to be careful using it.