Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
76 lines (54 loc) · 2.85 KB

CONTRIBUTING.rst

File metadata and controls

76 lines (54 loc) · 2.85 KB
Raw

Contributing to Astroquery

The first official release of astroquery occurred in September 2013.

Please see astropy's contributing guildelines for a general guide to the workflow involving git, etc. Everything below is astroquery-specific.

We strongly encourage draft pull requests to be opened early in development. If you are thinking of contributing a new module, please open a pull request as soon as you start developing code and mark it as a Draft PR on github.

New Features

We welcome any and all new features! If you have your own little query tool you wrote to access some obscure service, feel free to clean it up a little and submit it as a pull request (PR)! However, we'll ask you to at least write some simple tests and do your best to get the API to match the astroquery API.

Tests are welcome and encouraged, but can be built up over time. At least one example use is necessary for a new module to be accepted.

The template module should be the starting point for any new contribution. It includes detailed explanations of each function and class and can straightforwardly be filled out.

As shown in the template module, the minimum requirements for a new feature are:

  • Add the feature as a subdirectory of astroquery with at least an __init__.py and a core.py:

    astroquery/feature
astroquery/feature/__init__.py
astroquery/feature/core.py

  • Add a tests/ directory with at least one test:

    astroquery/feature/tests
astroquery/feature/tests/__init__.py
astroquery/feature/tests/test_feature.py

  • Add some documentation - at least one example, but it can be sparse at first:

    docs/astroquery/feature.rst

PRs will not be accepted if tests fail.

Important Guidelines

Astroquery is based on the requests module. All contributions must be based on the requests module and should not use urllib or any of the base python url modules unless there is a demonstrated necessity.

The requests module also generally should not be directly used, since the astroquery.query.BaseQuery class, which all astroquery classes should inherit from, provides access to its own _request method. This custom _request method is a wrapper around the requests.request function that provides important astroquery-specific utility, including caching, HTTP header generation, progressbars, and local writing-to-disk.

Dependencies

New contributions are generally not allowed to bring along additional dependencies.

The astropy ecosystem tools should be used whenever possible. For example, astropy.table should be used for table handling, or astropy.units for unit and quantity handling.