Development Setup¶

If you want to contribute code or documentation directly, you’ll need to create your own fork of the project on Github, and set up some version of the development environment described below, before making pull requests to submit new code, documentation, or examples of use.

Note

If you’re new to git and Github, you may want to check out:

Install Python 3.7¶

We use Anaconda or miniconda to manage our software environments. While using conda isn’t strictly required, it does make everything much easier to have everyone on the same platform.

Fork and Clone the PUDL Repository¶

On the main page of the PUDL repository you should see a Fork button in the upper right hand corner. Forking the repository makes a copy of it in your personal (or organizational) account on Github that is independent of, but linked to, the original “upstream” project.

Depending on your operating system and the git client you’re using to access Github, the exact cloning process might be different, but if you’re using a UNIX-like terminal, cloning the repository from your fork will look like this (with your own Github username or organizational name in place of USERNAME of course):

$ git clone https://github.com/USERNAME/pudl.git

This will download the whole history of the project, including the most recent version, and put it in a local directory called pudl.

Repository Organization¶

Inside your newly cloned local repository, you should see the following:

Directory / File	Contents
`docs/`	Documentation source files for Sphinx and Read The Docs.
`src/`	Package source code, isolated to avoid unintended imports.
`results/`	A graveyard of old Jupyter Notebooks and outputs. Ignore!
`scripts/`	Development scripts not distributed with the package.
`test/`	Modules for use with PyTest.
`environment.yml`	File defining the `pudl` `conda` environment.
`MANIFEST.in`	Template describing files included in the python package.
`pyproject.toml`	Configuration for development tools used with the project.
`setup.py`	Python build and packaging script.
`tox.ini`	Configuration for the Tox build and test framework.

Create and activate the pudl-dev conda environment¶

Inside the newly cloned repository, you should see an environment.yml file, which specifies the pudl-dev conda environment. You can create that environment locally from within the main repository directory by running:

$ conda update conda
$ conda config --set channel_priority strict
$ conda env create --name pudl-dev --file environment.yml
$ conda activate pudl-dev

Install PUDL for development¶

The catalystcoop.pudl package isn’t part of the pudl-dev environment since you’re going to be editing it. To install the local version that now exists in your cloned repository using pip, from the main repository directory (containing setup.py) run:

$ pip install --editable ./

Install PUDL QA/QC tools¶

We use automated tools to apply uniform coding style and formatting across the project codebase. This reduces merge conflicts, makes the code easier to read, and helps catch bugs before they are committed. These tools are part of the pudl conda environment, and their configuration files are checked into the Github repository, so they should be installed and ready to go if you’ve cloned the pudl repo and are working inside the pudl conda environment.

These tools can be run at three different stages in development:

inside your text editor or IDE, while you are writing code or documentation,
before you make a new commit to the repository using Git’s pre-commit hook scripts,
when the tests are run – either locally or on a continuous integration (CI) platform (PUDL uses Travis CI).

flake8¶

Flake8 is a popular Python linting framework, with a large selection of plugins. We use it to run the following checks:

PyFlakes, which checks Python code for correctness,
pycodestyle which checks whether code complies with PEP 8 formatting guidelines,
mccabe a tool that measures code complexity to highlight functions that need to be simplified or reorganized.
pydocstyle checks that Python docstrings comply with PEP 257 (via the flake8-docstrings plugin).
pep8-naming checks that variable names comply with Python naming conventions.
flake8-builtins checks to make sure you haven’t accidentally clobbered any reserved Python names with your own variables.

doc8¶

Doc8 is a lot like flake8, but for Python documentation written in the reStructuredText format and built by Sphinx. This is the de-facto standard for Python documentation. The doc8 tool checks for syntax errors and other formatting issues in the documentation source files under the docs/ directory.

autopep8¶

Instead of just alerting you that there’s a style issue in your Python code, autopep8 tries to fix it automatically, applying consistent formatting rules based on PEP 8.

isort¶

Similarly isort consistently groups and orders Python import statements in each module.

Python Editors¶

Many of the tools outlined above can be run automatically in the background while you are writing code or documentation, if you are using an editor that works well with for Python development. A couple of popular options are the free Atom editor developed by Github, and the less free Sublime Text editor. Both of them have many community maintained addons and plugins.

Git Pre-commit Hooks¶

Git hooks let you automatically run scripts at various points as you manage your source code. “Pre-commit” hook scripts are run when you try to make a new commit. These scripts can review your code and identify bugs, formatting errors, bad coding habits, and other issues before the code gets checked in. This gives you the opportunity to fix those issues first.

Pretty much all you need to do is enable pre-commit hooks:

$ pre-commit install

The scripts that run are configured in the .pre-commit-config.yaml file.

In addition to autopep8, isort, flake8, and doc8, the pre-commit hooks also run bandit (a tool for identifying common security issues in Python code) and several other checks that keep you from accidentally committing large binary files, leaving debugger breakpoints in your code, forgetting to resolve merge conflicts, and other gotchas that can be hard for humans to catch but are easy for a computer.

Note

If you want to make a pull request, it’s important that all these checks pass – otherwise the build will fail, since these same checks are tun by the tests on Travis.

Install and Validate the Data¶

In order to work on PUDL development, you’ll probably need to have a bunch of the data available locally. Follow the instructions in Creating a Datastore to set up a local data management environment and download some data locally, then run the ETL pipeline to generate some data packages and use them to populate a local SQLite database with as much PUDL data as you can stand (for development, we typically load all of the available data for ferc1, eia923, eia860, and epaipm, datasets, but only a single state’s worth of data for the much larger epacems hourly data.)

Using Tox to Validate PUDL¶

If you’ve done all of the above, you should be able to use tox to run our test suite, and perform data validation. For example, to validate the data stored in your PUDL SQLite database, you would simply run:

$ tox -v -e validate

Running the Tests¶

We also use tox to run PyTest against a packaged and separately installed version of the local repository package. Take a peek inside tox.ini to see what test environments are available. To run the same tests that will be run on Travis CI when you make a pull request, you can run:

$ tox -v -e travis -- --fast

This will run the linters and pre-commit checks on all the code, make sure that the docs can be built by Sphinx, and run the ETL process on a single year of data. The --fast is passed through to PyTest by tox because it is after the --. That test will also attempt to download a year of data into a temporary directory. If you want to skip the download step and use your already downloaded datastore, you can point the tests at it with --pudl_in=AUTO:

$ tox -v -e travis -- --fast --pudl_in=AUTO

Additional details can be found in Building and Testing PUDL.

Making a Pull Request¶

Before you make a pull request, please check that:

Your code passes all of the Travis tests by running them with tox
You can generate a new complete bundle of data packages, including all the available data (with the exception of epacems – all the years of a couple of states is sufficient for testing.)
Those data packages can be used to populate an SQLite database locally, using the datapkg_to_sqlite script.
The data validation tests can be run against that SQLite database, using tox -v -e validate as outlined above.
If you’ve added new data or substantial new code, please also include new tests and data validation. See the modules under test and test/validate for examples.

Then you can push the new code to your fork of the PUDL repository on Github, and from there, you can make a Pull Request inviting us to review your code and merge your improvements in with the main repository!