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Contributing

The bottom line. Follow your Nose, or our Nose. Write-run-love tests ✊.

Code of Conduct

Check out the Code of Conduct. Don't tl:dr; it, but the general idea is to be nice.

Have a Bug Report?

Open an issue! Go to https://github.com/plotly/plotly.py/issues. It's possible that your issue was already addressed. If it wasn't, open it. We also accept PRs; take a look at the steps below for instructions on how to do this.

Have Questions about Plotly?

Check out our Support App: https://support.plot.ly/libraries/python or Community Forum: https://community.plot.ly/.

Setup

Fork, Clone, Setup Your Version of the Plotly Python API

First, you'll need to get our project. This is the appropriate clone command (if you're unfamiliar with this process, https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo):

DO THIS (in the directory where you want the repo to live)

git clone https://github.com/plotly/python-api.git

Submodules

Second, this project uses git submodules! They're both helpful and, at times, difficult to work with. The good news is you probably don't need to think about them! Just run the following shell command to make sure that your local repo is wired properly:

DO THIS (run this command in your new plotly-api directory)

make setup_subs

That's going to initialize the submodules we use in this project, update them so that they're synced to the proper commit, and copy files to the appropriate locations in your local repo.

Here's what you need to know: changes to any files inside the following directories will get overwritten. These are synced with the submodules, if you need to change functionality there, you will need to make a pull request in the appropriate sub project repository.

  • chunked_requests
  • graph_reference
  • mplexporter

Additionally, there are some project shortcuts that live in the makefile file. You can read all about this in the make_instructions.txt file. OR, just run:

make readme

Making a Development Branch

Third, don't work in the master branch. As soon as you get your master branch ready, run:

DO THIS (but change the branch name)

git checkout -b my-dev-branch

... where you should give your branch a more descriptive name than my-dev-branch

Pull Request When Ready

Once you've made your changes (and hopefully written some tests...), make that pull request!

Suggestions

Local Python

Setting up Python versions that don't require you to use sudo is a good idea. In addition, the core Python on your machine may not be the Python that we've developed in! Here are some nice guides for Mac, Windows, and Linux:

Virtualenv

Virtualenv is a way to create Python environments on your machine that know nothing about one another. This is really helpful for ironing out dependency-problems arising from different versions of packages. Here's a nice guide on how to do this: http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/dev/virtualenvs/

Alter Your PYTHONPATH

The PYTHONPATH variable in your shell tells Python where to look for modules. Since you'll be developing, it'll be a pain to need to install Python every time you need to test some functionality (or at least ensure you're running code from the right directory...). You can easily make this change from a shell:

export PYTHONPATH="/path/to/local/repo:$PYTHONPATH"

Note, that's non-permanent. When you close the shell, that variable definition disappears. Also, path/to/local/repo is your specific repository path (e.g., /Users/andrew/projects/python-api).

Why?

Now you can run the following code and be guaranteed to have a working development version that you can make changes to on-the-fly, test, and be confident will not break on other's machines!

pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -r optional-requirements.txt
export PYTHONPATH="/path/to/local/repo:$PYTHONPATH"

Dependencies

There's a short list of core dependencies you'll need installed in your Python environment to have any sort of fun with Plotly's Python API (see requirements.txt). Additionally, you're likely to have even more fun if you install some other requirements (see optional-requirements.txt).

Dependencies and Virtualenv

If you decided to follow the suggestion about about the Virtualenv and you've run source bin/activate within your new virtualenv directory to activate it--you can run the following to install the core dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

To install the optional dependencies:

pip install -r optional-requirements.txt

Testing

We take advantage of two tools to run tests:

  • tox, which is both a virtualenv management and test tool.
  • nose, which is is an extension of Python's unittest

Running Tests with nose

Since our tests cover all the functionality, to prevent tons of errors from showing up and having to parse through a messy output, you'll need to install optional-requirements.txt as explained above.

After you've done that, go ahead and follow (y)our Nose!

nosetests -w plotly/tests

Or for more verbose output:

nosetests -w plotly/tests -v

Either of those will run every test we've written for the Python API. You can get more granular by running something like:

nosetests -w plotly/tests/test_plotly

... or even more granular by running something like:

nosetests plotly/tests/test_plotly/test_plot.py

Running tests with tox

Running tests with tox is much more powerful, but requires a bit more setup.

You'll need to export an environment variable for each tox environment you wish to test with. For example, if you want to test with Python 2.7 and Python 3.4, but only care to check the core specs, you would need to ensure that the following variables are exported:

export PLOTLY_TOX_PYTHON_27=<python binary>
export PLOTLY_TOX_PYTHON_34=<python binary>

Where the <python binary is going to be specific to your development setup. As a more complete example, you might have this loaded in a .bash_profile (or equivalent shell loader):

############
# tox envs #
############

export PLOTLY_TOX_PYTHON_27=python2.7
export PLOTLY_TOX_PYTHON_34=python3.4
export TOXENV=py27-core,py34-core

Where TOXENV is the environment list you want to use when invoking tox from the command line. Note that the PLOTLY_TOX_* pattern is used to pass in variables for use in the tox.ini file. Though this is a little setup, intensive, you'll get the following benefits:

  • tox will automatically manage a virtual env for each environment you want to test in.
  • You only have to run tox and know that the module is working in both Python 2 and Python 3.

Finally, tox allows you to pass in additional command line arguments that are formatted in (by us) in the tox.ini file, see {posargs}. This is setup to help with our nose attr configuration. To run only tests that are not tagged with slow, you could use the following command:

tox -- -a '!slow'

Note that anything after -- is substituted in for {posargs} in the tox.ini. For completeness, because it's reasonably confusing, if you want to force a match for multiple nose attr tags, you comma-separate the tags like so:

tox -- -a '!slow','!matplotlib'

Writing Tests

You're strongly encouraged to write tests that check your added functionality.

When you write a new test anywhere under the tests directory, if your PR gets accepted, that test will run in a virtual machine to ensure that future changes don't break your contributions!

Test accounts include: PythonTest, PlotlyImageTest, and PlotlyStageTest.

Publishing to Pip

You'll need the credentials file ~/.pypirc. Request access from @theengineear and @chriddyp. Then, from inside the repository:

(plotly.py) $ git checkout master
(plotly.py) $ git stash
(plotly.py) $ git pull origin master
(plotly.py) $ python setup.py sdist upload # upload to pip

After it has uploaded, move to another directly and double+triple check that you are able to upgrade ok:

$ pip install plotly --upgrade

And ask one of your friends to do it too. Our tests should catch any issues, but you never know.

<3 Team Plotly

Contributing to the Figure Factories

If you are interested in contributing to the ever-growing Plotly figure factory library in Python, check out the documentation to learn how.