CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Welcome to certdeploy contributor's guide.

This document focuses on getting any potential contributor familiarized with the development processes, but other kinds of contributions are also appreciated.

If you are new to using git or have never collaborated in a project previously, please have a look at contribution-guide.org. Other resources are also listed in the excellent guide created by FreeCodeCamp ¹.

Please notice, all users and contributors are expected to be open, considerate, reasonable, and respectful. When in doubt, Python Software Foundation's Code of Conduct is a good reference in terms of behavior guidelines.

Issue Reports

If you experience bugs or general issues with certdeploy, please have a look on the issue tracker. If you don't see anything useful there, please feel free to fire an issue report.

:::{tip} Please don't forget to include the closed issues in your search. Sometimes a solution was already reported, and the problem is considered solved. :::

New issue reports should include information about your environment (e.g., operating system, Python version, docker image version) and steps to reproduce the problem. Please try also to simplify the reproduction steps to a very minimal example that still illustrates the problem you are facing. By removing other factors, you help us to identify the root cause of the issue.

Documentation Improvements

You can help improve certdeploy docs by making them more readable and coherent, or by adding missing information and correcting mistakes.

certdeploy documentation uses Sphinx as its main documentation compiler. This means that the docs are kept in the same repository as the project code, and that any documentation update is done in the same way was a code contribution.

certdeploy documentation is written with MyST markdown. In any README.md the goal is to remain as close to GitHub markdown so that they can be read cleanly directly on GitHub. Doc-strings are handled slightly differently than *.md files. Just follow the existing patterns in the documentation unless your changes are specifically (and only) changing patterns globally.

Some extra rules for the README.md and other .md files:

• Variable and dictionary key names, and inline commands and code get single back ticks.
• Literal values, variable values including numbers get double back ticks.
• Anywhere a default value from the code is redeclared add an html comment like the following <!--DEFAULT FROM CODE- certdeploy.where_ever.the.value.lives --> at the end of the line to make it easier to audit the docs for defaults that need updating.

:::{tip} Please notice that the GitHub web interface provides a quick way of propose changes in certdeploy's files. While this mechanism can be tricky for normal code contributions, it works perfectly fine for contributing to the docs, and can be quite handy.

If you are interested in trying this method out, please navigate to the docs folder in the source repository, find which file you would like to propose changes and click in the little pencil icon at the top, to open GitHub's code editor. Once you finish editing the file, please write a message in the form at the bottom of the page describing which changes have you made and what are the motivations behind them and submit your proposal. :::

When working on documentation changes in your local machine, you can compile them using tox :

tox -e docs

and use Python's built-in web server for a preview in your web browser (http://localhost:8000):

python3 -m http.server --directory 'docs/_build/html'

Code Contributions

All code must:

• Conform to Google's python style guide with a few exceptions. Look at the existing code for a lead on those changes. Bellow are some of them.

  • Always prefer single quotes except around doc-strings or inside single quotes.
  • Use Arguments: instead of Args: in doc-strings.
  • No trailing commas except in single item tuples.
  • Type hinting must be used unless conforming to an interface that doesn't use it.
    • returning None, self, or cls hints are not needed.

      • Remember to not include type info in Arguments: unless the code isn't type hinted. For example:

        Arguments:
           foo: The correct way if using type hinting.
        
        Arguments:
           foo (int): The correct way if not using type hinting.
        

• Pass the pre-commit linting or tox -e lint (same thing).

• Pass the unit tests (tox -e default).

• Pass the docker tests (tox -e dockerbuild && tox -e dockertest).

New features must:

• Include unit tests or integration tests covering both success and failure modes.
• Include corresponding documentation changes.

Changes must:

• Include updated tests where they exist already.

All code should:

• Have accompanying unit or integration tests. It's not required. The project isn't starting with 100% coverage so it's not going to ruin anything.

Notes on testing:

• The tests are split into tests for the code and tests for the docker containers. There will be some deselected tests. Don't worry about that. They all get run eventually throughout the testing process.

Notes on writing tests:

• Tests fixtures that return plain callables should use the typing.Callable with as much of the detail as is relevant to how it's being used. Arguments are less important than return values in general on the test side. For example:

  def test_foo_does_bar(dummy_foo_factory: Callable[[important_config, ...], DummyFoo]):
     ...
  

  dummy_foo_factory could take a dozen more arguments but important_config is all the test uses and DummyFoo is what the test interacts with. This is just to make IDEs happier.

Submit an issue

Before you work on any non-trivial code contribution it's best to first create a report in the issue tracker to start a discussion on the subject. This often provides additional considerations and avoids unnecessary work.

Create an environment

Before you start coding, we recommend creating an isolated virtual environment to avoid any problems with your installed Python packages. This can easily be done via either virtualenv:

virtualenv <PATH TO VENV>
source <PATH TO VENV>/bin/activate

or Miniconda:

conda create -n certdeploy python=3 six virtualenv pytest pytest-cov
conda activate certdeploy

Clone the repository

1. Create an user account on GitHub if you do not already have one.

2. Fork the project repository: click on the Fork button near the top of the page. This creates a copy of the code under your account on GitHub.

3. Clone this copy to your local disk:

   git clone git@github.com:YourLogin/certdeploy.git
   cd certdeploy
   

4. You should run:

   pip install -U pip setuptools -e .
   

   to be able to import the package under development in the Python REPL.

5. Install pre-commit:

   pip install pre-commit
   pre-commit install
   

   certdeploy comes with a lot of hooks configured to automatically help the developer to check the code being written.

6. Install docker and initialize a swarm node if you don't already have those. The integration tests require a docker swarm node. The steps to accomplish those is beyond the scope of this document.

Implement your changes

1. Create a branch to hold your changes:

   git checkout -b my-feature
   

   and start making changes. Never work on the main branch!

2. Start your work on this branch. Don't forget to add docstrings to new functions, modules and classes, especially if they are part of public APIs.

3. Add yourself to the list of contributors in AUTHORS.rst.

4. When you’re done editing, do:

   git add <MODIFIED FILES>
   git commit
   

   to record your changes in git.

   Please make sure to see the validation messages from pre-commit and fix any eventual issues. This should automatically use flake8/black to check/fix the code style in a way that is compatible with the project.

   :::{important} Don't forget to add unit tests and documentation in case your contribution adds an additional feature and is not just a bugfix.

   Moreover, writing a descriptive commit message is highly recommended. In case of doubt, you can check the commit history with:

   git log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --all
   

   to look for recurring communication patterns. :::

5. Please check that your changes don't break any unit or integration tests with:

   tox
   

   Or if you have made changes to anything in docker/client or docker/server

   tox -e lint && tox -e default && tox -e dockerbuild && tox -e dockertest
   

   (after having installed tox with pip install tox or pipx).

   You can also use tox to run several other pre-configured tasks in the repository. Try tox -av to see a list of the available checks.

   The pytest tests are split into tests that test the code and tests that test the docker images. There will be "skipped" tests unless calling pytest directly.

Submit your contribution

1. If everything works fine, push your local branch to the remote server with:

   git push -u origin my-feature
   

2. Go to the web page of your fork and click "Create pull request" to send your changes for review.

Troubleshooting

The following tips can be used when facing problems to build or test the package:

1. Make sure to fetch all the tags from the upstream repository. The command git describe --abbrev=0 --tags should return the version you are expecting. If you are trying to run CI scripts in a fork repository, make sure to push all the tags. You can also try to remove all the egg files or the complete egg folder, i.e., .eggs, as well as the *.egg-info folders in the src folder or potentially in the root of your project.

2. Sometimes tox misses out when new dependencies are added, especially to setup.cfg and docs/requirements.txt. If you find any problems with missing dependencies when running a command with tox, try to recreate the tox environment using the -r flag. For example, instead of:

   tox -e docs
   

   Try running:

   tox -r -e docs
   

3. Make sure to have a reliable tox installation that uses the correct Python version (e.g., 3.7+). When in doubt you can run:

   tox --version
   # OR
   which tox
   

   If you have trouble and are seeing weird errors upon running tox, you can also try to create a dedicated virtual environment with a tox binary freshly installed. For example:

   virtualenv .venv
   source .venv/bin/activate
   .venv/bin/pip install tox
   .venv/bin/tox -e all
   

4. Pytest can drop you in an interactive session in the case an error occurs. In order to do that you need to pass a --pdb option (for example by running tox -- -k <NAME OF THE FALLING TEST> --pdb). You can also setup breakpoints manually instead of using the --pdb option.

Maintainer tasks

Releases

If you are part of the group of maintainers and have correct user permissions on PyPI, the following steps can be used to release a new version for certdeploy:

1. Make sure all unit and integration tests are successful.
2. Tag the current commit on the main branch with a release tag, e.g., v1.2.3.
3. Push the new tag to the upstream repository, e.g., git push upstream v1.2.3
4. Clean up the dist and build folders with tox -e clean (or rm -rf dist build) to avoid confusion with old builds and Sphinx docs.
5. Run tox -e build and check that the files in dist have the correct version (no .dirty or git hash) according to the git tag. Also check the sizes of the distributions, if they are too big (e.g., > 500KB), unwanted clutter may have been accidentally included.
6. Run tox -e publish -- --repository pypi and check that everything was uploaded to PyPI correctly.
7. Run tox -e dockerpublish to publish new docker images.
8. Verify Readthedocs is updated.
9. Verify pypi is updated.
10. Verify Docker Hub is updated.

Footnotes

1. Even though, these resources focus on open source projects and communities, the general ideas behind collaborating with other developers to collectively create software are general and can be applied to all sorts of environments, including private companies and proprietary code bases. ↩