Contributing to Kallithea
Kallithea is developed and maintained by its users. Please join us and scratch your own itch.
Infrastructure
The main repository is hosted on Our Own Kallithea (aka OOK) at https://kallithea-scm.org/repos/kallithea/, our self-hosted instance of Kallithea.
For now, we use Bitbucket for pull requests and issue tracking. The issue tracker is for tracking bugs, not for support, discussion, or ideas -- please use the mailing list or :ref:`IRC <readme>` to reach the community.
We use Weblate to translate the user interface messages into languages other than English. Join our project on Hosted Weblate to help us. To register, you can use your Bitbucket or GitHub account. See :ref:`translations` for more details.
Getting started
To get started with development:
hg clone https://kallithea-scm.org/repos/kallithea cd kallithea virtualenv ../kallithea-venv source ../kallithea-venv/bin/activate pip install --upgrade pip setuptools pip install -e . gearbox make-config my.ini gearbox setup-db -c my.ini --user=user --email=user@example.com --password=password --repos=/tmp gearbox serve -c my.ini --reload & firefox http://127.0.0.1:5000/
You can also start out by forking https://bitbucket.org/conservancy/kallithea on Bitbucket and create a local clone of your own fork.
Running tests
After finishing your changes make sure all tests pass cleanly. Install the test dependencies, then run the testsuite by invoking py.test from the project root:
pip install -r dev_requirements.txt py.test
Note that testing on Python 2.6 also requires unittest2.
You can also use tox to run the tests with all supported Python versions (currently Python 2.6--2.7).
When running tests, Kallithea uses kallithea/tests/test.ini and populates the SQLite database specified there.
It is possible to avoid recreating the full test database on each invocation of the tests, thus eliminating the initial delay. To achieve this, run the tests as:
gearbox serve -c kallithea/tests/test.ini --pid-file=test.pid --daemon KALLITHEA_WHOOSH_TEST_DISABLE=1 KALLITHEA_NO_TMP_PATH=1 py.test kill -9 $(cat test.pid)
In these commands, the following variables are used:
KALLITHEA_WHOOSH_TEST_DISABLE=1 - skip whoosh index building and tests KALLITHEA_NO_TMP_PATH=1 - disable new temp path for tests, used mostly for testing_vcs_operations
You can run individual tests by specifying their path as argument to py.test. py.test also has many more options, see py.test -h. Some useful options are:
-k EXPRESSION only run tests which match the given substring
expression. An expression is a python evaluable
expression where all names are substring-matched
against test names and their parent classes. Example:
-x, --exitfirst exit instantly on first error or failed test.
--lf rerun only the tests that failed at the last run (or
all if none failed)
--ff run all tests but run the last failures first. This
may re-order tests and thus lead to repeated fixture
setup/teardown
--pdb start the interactive Python debugger on errors.
-s, --capture=no don't capture stdout (any stdout output will be
printed immediately)
Contribution guidelines
Kallithea is GPLv3 and we assume all contributions are made by the committer/contributor and under GPLv3 unless explicitly stated. We do care a lot about preservation of copyright and license information for existing code that is brought into the project.
Contributions will be accepted in most formats -- such as pull requests on Bitbucket, something hosted on your own Kallithea instance, or patches sent by email to the kallithea-general mailing list.
When contributing via Bitbucket, please make your fork of https://bitbucket.org/conservancy/kallithea/ non-publishing -- it is one of the settings on "Repository details" page. This ensures your commits are in "draft" phase and makes it easier for you to address feedback and for project maintainers to integrate your changes.
Make sure to test your changes both manually and with the automatic tests before posting.
We care about quality and review and keeping a clean repository history. We might give feedback that requests polishing contributions until they are "perfect". We might also rebase and collapse and make minor adjustments to your changes when we apply them.
We try to make sure we have consensus on the direction the project is taking. Everything non-sensitive should be discussed in public -- preferably on the mailing list. We aim at having all non-trivial changes reviewed by at least one other core developer before pushing. Obvious non-controversial changes will be handled more casually.
For now we just have one official branch ("default") and will keep it so stable that it can be (and is) used in production. Experimental changes should live elsewhere (for example in a pull request) until they are ready.
Coding guidelines
We don't have a formal coding/formatting standard. We are currently using a mix of Mercurial's (https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/CodingStyle), pep8, and consistency with existing code. Run scripts/run-all-cleanup before committing to ensure some basic code formatting consistency.
We support both Python 2.6.x and 2.7.x and nothing else. For now we don't care about Python 3 compatibility.
We try to support the most common modern web browsers. IE9 is still supported to the extent it is feasible, IE8 is not.
We primarily support Linux and OS X on the server side but Windows should also work.
HTML templates should use 2 spaces for indentation ... but be pragmatic. We should use templates cleverly and avoid duplication. We should use reasonable semantic markup with element classes and IDs that can be used for styling and testing. We should only use inline styles in places where it really is semantic (such as display: none).
JavaScript must use ; between/after statements. Indentation 4 spaces. Inline multiline functions should be indented two levels -- one for the () and one for {}. Variables holding jQuery objects should be named with a leading $.
Commit messages should have a leading short line summarizing the changes. For bug fixes, put (Issue #123) at the end of this line.
Use American English grammar and spelling overall. Use English title case for page titles, button labels, headers, and 'labels' for fields in forms.
Template helpers (that is, everything in kallithea.lib.helpers) should only be referenced from templates. If you need to call a helper from the Python code, consider moving the function somewhere else (e.g. to the model).
Notes on the SQLAlchemy session
Each HTTP request runs inside an independent SQLAlchemy session (as well as in an independent database transaction). Database model objects (almost) always belong to a particular SQLAlchemy session, which means that SQLAlchemy will ensure that they're kept in sync with the database (but also means that they cannot be shared across requests).
Objects can be added to the session using Session().add, but this is rarely needed:
- When creating a database object by calling the constructor directly, it must explicitly be added to the session.
- When creating an object using a factory function (like create_repo), the returned object has already (by convention) been added to the session, and should not be added again.
- When getting an object from the session (via Session().query or any of the utility functions that look up objects in the database), it's already part of the session, and should not be added again. SQLAlchemy monitors attribute modifications automatically for all objects it knows about and syncs them to the database.
SQLAlchemy also flushes changes to the database automatically; manually calling Session().flush is usually only necessary when the Python code needs the database to assign an "auto-increment" primary key ID to a freshly created model object (before flushing, the ID attribute will be None).
"Roadmap"
We do not have a road map but are waiting for your contributions. Refer to the wiki for some ideas of places we might want to go -- contributions in these areas are very welcome.