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Developer's Guide

Welcome to the xonsh developer's guide! This is a place for developers to place information that does not belong in the user's guide or the library reference but is useful or necessary for the next people that come along to develop xonsh.

Note

All code changes must go through the pull request review procedure.

Style Guide

xonsh is a pure Python project, and so we use PEP8 (with some additions) to ensure consistency throughout the code base.

Rules to Write By

It is important to refer to things and concepts by their most specific name. When writing xonsh code or documentation please use technical terms appropriately. The following rules help provide needed clarity.

Interfaces

  • User-facing APIs should be as generic and robust as possible.
  • Tests belong in the top-level tests directory.
  • Documentation belongs in the top-level docs directory.

Expectations

  • Code must have associated tests and adequate documentation.
  • User-interaction code (such as the Shell class) is hard to test. Mechanism to test such constructs should be developed over time.
  • Have extreme empathy for your users.
  • Be selfish. Since you will be writing tests you will be your first user.

Python Style Guide

xonsh uses PEP8 for all Python code. The following rules apply where PEP8 is open to interpretation.

  • Use absolute imports (import xonsh.tools) rather than explicit relative imports (import .tools). Implicit relative imports (import tools) are never allowed.
  • Use 'single quotes' for string literals, and """triple double quotes""" for docstrings. Double quotes are allowed to prevent single quote escaping, e.g. "Y'all c'mon o'er here!"
  • We use sphinx with the numpydoc extension to autogenerate API documentation. Follow the numpydoc standard for docstrings.
  • Simple functions should have simple docstrings.
  • Lines should be at most 80 characters long. The 72 and 79 character recommendations from PEP8 are not required here.
  • All Python code should be compliant with Python 3.4+. At some unforeseen date in the future, Python 2.7 support may be supported.
  • Tests should be written with nose using a procedural style. Do not use unittest directly or write tests in an object-oriented style.
  • Test generators make more dots and the dots must flow!

You can easily check for style issues, including some outright bugs such as mispelled variable names, using pylint. If you're using Anaconda you'll need to run "conda install pylint" once. You can easily run pylint on the edited files in your uncommited git change:

$ pylint $(git status -s | awk '/\.py$$/ { print $$2 }' | sort)

If you want to lint the entire code base run:

$ pylint $(find tests xonsh -name \*.py | sort)

How to Test

Docker

If you want to run your "work in progress version" without installing and in a fresh environment you can use Docker. If Docker is installed you just have to run this:

$ python xonsh-in-docker.py

This will build and run the current state of the repository in an isolated container (it may take a while the first time you run it). There are two additionals arguments you can pass this script.

  • The version of python
  • the version of prompt_toolkit

Example:

$ python docker.py 3.4 0.57

Ensure your cwd is the root directory of the project (i.e., the one containing the .git directory).

Dependencies

Prep your environment for running the tests:

$ pip install requirements-tests.txt

Running the Tests - Basic

Run all the tests using Nose:

$ nosetests -q

Use "-q" to keep nose from outputing a dot for every test. There are A LOT of tests and you will waste time waiting for all the dots to get pushed through stdout.

Running the Tests - Advanced

To perform all unit tests:

$ scripts/run_tests.xsh all

If you're working on a change and haven't yet committed it you can run the tests associated with the change. This does not require that the change include the unit test module. This will execute any unit tests that are part of the change as well as the unit tests for xonsh source modules in the change:

$ scripts/run_tests.xsh

If you want to run specific tests you can specify the test names to execute. For example to run test_aliases:

$ scripts/run_tests.xsh aliases

The test name can be the bare test name (e.g., aliases), include the test_ prefix and .py suffix without the directory (e.g., test_aliases.py), or the complete relative path (e.g., tests/test_aliases.py). For example:

Note that you can pass multiple test names in the above examples:

$ scripts/run_tests.xsh aliases environ

As before, if you want to test the xonsh code that is installed on your system first cd into the tests directory then run the tests:

$ cd tests
$ env XONSHRC='' nosetests test_aliases.py test_environ.py

Happy testing!

How to Document

Documentation takes many forms. This will guide you through the steps of successful documentation.

Docstrings

No matter what language you are writing in, you should always have documentation strings along with you code. This is so important that it is part of the style guide. When writing in Python, your docstrings should be in reStructured Text using the numpydoc format.

Auto-Documentation Hooks

The docstrings that you have written will automatically be connected to the website, once the appropriate hooks have been setup. At this stage, all documentation lives within xonsh's top-level docs directory. We uses the sphinx tool to manage and generate the documentation, which you can learn about from the sphinx website. If you want to generate the documentation, first xonsh itself must be installed and then you may run the following command from the docs dir:

~/xonsh/docs $ make html

For each new module, you will have to supply the appropriate hooks. This should be done the first time that the module appears in a pull request. From here, call the new module mymod. The following explains how to add hooks.

Python Hooks

Python documentation lives in the docs/api directory. First, create a file in this directory that represents the new module called mymod.rst. The docs/api directory matches the structure of the xonsh/ directory. So if your module is in a sub-package, you'll need to go into the sub-package's directory before creating mymod.rst. The contents of this file should be as follows:

mymod.rst:

.. _xonsh_mymod:

=======================================
My Awesome Module -- :mod:`xonsh.mymod`
=======================================

.. currentmodule:: xonsh.mymod

.. automodule:: xonsh.mymod
    :members:

This will discover all of the docstrings in mymod and create the appropriate webpage. Now, you need to hook this page up to the rest of the website.

Go into the index.rst file in docs/xonsh or other subdirectory and add mymod to the appropriate toctree (which stands for table-of-contents tree). Note that every sub-package has its own index.rst file.

Building the Website

Building the website/documentation requires the following dependencies:

  1. Sphinx
  2. Cloud Sphinx Theme

Procedure for modifying the website

The xonsh website source files are located in the docs directory. A developer first makes necessary changes, then rebuilds the website locally by executing the command:

$ make html

This will generate html files for the website in the _build/html/ folder. The developer may view the local changes by opening these files with their favorite browser, e.g.:

$ google-chrome _build/html/index.html

Once the developer is satisfied with the changes, the changes should be committed and pull-requested per usual. Once the pull request is accepted, the developer can push their local changes directly to the website by:

$ make push-root

Branches and Releases

Mainline xonsh development occurs on the master branch. Other branches may be used for feature development (topical branches) or to represent past and upcoming releases.

All releases should have a release candidate ('-rc1') that comes out 2 - 5 days prior to the scheduled release. During this time, no changes should occur to a special release branch ('vX.X.X-release').

The release branch is there so that development can continue on the develop branch while the release candidates (rc) are out and under review. This is because otherwise any new developments would have to wait until post-release to be merged into develop to prevent them from accidentally getting released early.

As such, the 'vX.X.X-release' branch should only exist while there are release candidates out. They are akin to a temporary second level of staging, and so everything that is in this branch should also be part of master.

Every time a new release candidate comes out the vX.X.X-release should be tagged with the name 'X.X.X-rcX'. There should be a 2 - 5 day period of time in between release candidates. When the full and final release happens, the 'vX.X.X-release' branch is merged into master and then deleted.

If you have a new fix that needs to be in the next release candidate, you should make a topical branch and then pull request it into the release branch. After this has been accepted, the topical branch should be merged with master as well.

The release branch must be quiet and untouched for 2 - 5 days prior to the full release.

The release candidate procedure here only applies to major and minor releases. Micro releases may be pushed and released directly without having a release candidate.

Checklist

When releasing xonsh, make sure to do the following items in order:

  1. Review ALL issues in the issue tracker, reassigning or closing them as needed.
  2. Ensure that all issues in this release's milestone have been closed. Moving issues to the next release's milestone is a perfectly valid strategy for completing this milestone.
  3. Perform maintenance tasks for this project, see below.
  4. Write and commit the release notes.
  5. Review the current state of documentation and make appropriate updates.
  6. Bump the version (in code, documentation, etc.) and commit the change.
  7. If this is a release candidate, tag the release branch with a name that matches that of the release:
    • If this is the first release candidate, create a release branch called 'vX.X.X-release' off of develop. Tag this branch with the name 'X.X.X-rc1'.
    • If this is the second or later release candidate, tag the release branch with the name 'X.X.X-rcX'.
  8. If this is the full and final release (and not a release candidate), merge the release branch into the master branch. Next, tag the master branch with the name 'X.X.X'. Finally, delete the release branch.
  9. Push the tags upstream
  10. Update release information on the website.

Maintenance Tasks

You can cleanup your local repository of transient files such as *.pyc files created by unit testing by running:

$ rm -f xonsh/lexer_table.py xonsh/parser_table.py
$ rm -f xonsh/lexer_test_table.py xonsh/parser_test_table.py
$ rm -f xonsh/*.pyc tests/*.pyc
$ rm -f xonsh/*.rej tests/*.rej
$rm -fr build

Performing the Release

To perform the release, run these commands for the following tasks:

pip upload:

$ ./setup.py sdist upload

conda upload:

$ rm -f /path/to/conda/conda-bld/src_cache/xonsh.tar.gz
$ conda build --no-test recipe
$ conda convert -p all -o /path/to/conda/conda-bld /path/to/conda/conda-bld/linux-64/xonsh-X.X.X-0.tar.bz2
$ binstar upload /path/to/conda/conda-bld/*/xonsh-X.X.X*.tar.bz2

website:

$ cd docs
$ make clean html push-root

Document History

Portions of this page have been forked from the PyNE documentation, Copyright 2011-2015, the PyNE Development Team. All rights reserved.