πŸ’» Development

Contributing

Have you found a bug in VeraGrid or have a suggestion for a new functionality? Then get in touch with us by opening up an issue on the issue board or join the community chat to discuss possible new developments with the community and the maintainers.

Setup your git repository

Note: The following setup is just a suggestion of how to setup your repository and is supposed to make contributing easier, especially for newcomers. If you have a different setup that you are more comfortable with, you do not have to adopt this setup.

If you want to contribute for the first time, you can set up your environment like this:

  • If you have not done it yet: install git and create a GitHub account;

  • Create a fork of the official VeraGrid repository by clicking on β€œFork” in the official repository;

  • Clone the forked repository to your local machine: git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/VeraGrid.git

  • Copy the following configuration at the bottom of to the veragrid/.git/config file (the .git folder is hidden, so you might have to enable showing hidden folders) and insert your github username:

[remote "origin"]
    url = https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/VeraGrid.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
    pushurl = https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/VeraGrid.git
[remote "upstream"]
    url = https://github.com/SanPen/VeraGrid.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/upstream/*
[branch "master"]
    remote = origin
    merge = refs/heads/master

The master branch is now configured to automatically track the official VeraGrid master branch. So if you are on the master branch and use:

git fetch upstream
git merge upstream/master

…your local repository will be updated with the newest changes in the official VeraGrid repository.

Since you cannot push directly to the official VeraGrid repository, if you are on master and do:

git push

…your push is by default routed to your own fork instead of the official VeraGrid repository with the setting as defined above.

Contribute

All contributions to the VeraGrid repository are made through pull requests to the devel branch. You can either submit a pull request from the develop branch of your fork or create a special feature branch that you keep the changes on. A feature branch is the way to go if you have multiple issues that you are working on in parallel and want to submit with separate pull requests. If you only have small, one-time changes to submit, you can also use the devel branch to submit your pull request.

If you wish to discuss a contribution before the pull request is ready to be officially submitted, create an issue in the official repository and link to your own fork. Do not create pull requests that are not ready to be merged!

Note: The following guide assumes the remotes are set up as described above. If you have a different setup, you will have to adapt the commands accordingly.

Test Suite

VeraGrid uses pytest for automatic software testing.

If you make changes to VeraGrid that you plan to submit, first make sure that all tests are still passing. You can do this locally with:

pytest

If you have added new functionality, you should also add a new function that tests this functionality. pytest automatically detects all functions in the src/tests folder that start with test_ and are located in a file that also starts with test_ as relevant test cases.

Testing with pytest

Unit test (for pytest) are included in src/tests. As defined in pytest.ini, all files matching test_*.py are executed by running:

pytest

Files matching *_test.py are not executed; they were not formatted specifically for pytest but were mostly done for manual testing and documentation purposes.

Additional tests should be developed for each new and existing feature. pytest should be run before each commit to prevent easily detectable bugs.