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Contributor Guide

Thank you for your interest in improving this project. This project is open-source under the BSD 3 Clause and welcomes contributions in the form of bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests.

Here is a list of important resources for contributors:

How to report a bug

Report bugs on the Issue Tracker.

When filing an issue, make sure to answer these questions:

  • Which operating system and Python version are you using?
  • Which version of this project are you using?
  • What did you do?
  • What did you expect to see?
  • What did you see instead?

The best way to get your bug fixed is to provide a test case, and/or steps to reproduce the issue.

How to request a feature

Request features on the Issue Tracker.

How to set up your development environment

We recommend using uv to manage the project environment.

  1. Install uv (if needed), see uv installation instructions.

  2. Sync the project with development, docs, and testing dependencies:

$ uv sync --extra dev --extra docs --extra testing

How to build the documentation locally

Serve the documentation locally with live reload:

$ uv run zensical serve

The documentation will be available at http://127.0.0.1:8000/.

To build static documentation files:

$ uv run zensical build

The built documentation will be in the site directory.

How to test the project

  1. Install the package with development requirements:
$ uv sync --extra testing
  1. Run the full test suite:
$ uv run pytest

Unit tests are located in the tests directory, and are written using the pytest testing framework.

How to submit changes

Open a pull request to submit changes to this project.

Your pull request needs to meet the following guidelines for acceptance:

  • The test suite must pass without errors and warnings.
  • Include unit tests.
  • If your changes add functionality, update the documentation accordingly.

To run linting and code formatting checks before committing your change, install pre-commit hooks and run checks before pushing:

$ uv run pre-commit install
$ uv run pre-commit run --all-files

It is recommended to open an issue before starting work on anything. This will allow a chance to talk it over with the owners and validate your approach.