Contributing

Thanks for considering contributing! Please read this document to learn the various ways you can contribute to this project and how to go about doing it.

Bug reports and feature requests

Did you find a bug?

First, do a quick search to see whether your issue has already been reported. If your issue has already been reported, please comment on the existing issue.

Otherwise, open a new GitHub issue. Be sure to include a clear title and description. The description should include as much relevant information as possible. The description should explain how to reproduce the erroneous behavior as well as the behavior you expect to see. Ideally you would include a code sample or an executable test case demonstrating the expected behavior.

Do you have a suggestion for an enhancement or new feature?

We use GitHub issues to track feature requests. Before you create a feature request:

  • Make sure you have a clear idea of the enhancement you would like. If you have a vague idea, consider discussing it first on a GitHub issue.

  • Check the documentation to make sure your feature does not already exist.

  • Do a quick search to see whether your feature has already been suggested.

When creating your request, please:

  • Provide a clear title and description.

  • Explain why the enhancement would be useful. It may be helpful to highlight the feature in other libraries.

  • Include code examples to demonstrate how the enhancement would be used.

Making a pull request

When you’re ready to contribute code to address an open issue, please follow these guidelines to help us be able to review your pull request (PR) quickly.

  1. Initial setup (only do this once)

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    If you haven’t already done so, please fork this repository on GitHub.

    Then clone your fork locally with

     git clone https://github.com/USERNAME/github-action-toolkit-python.git
    

    or

     git clone git@github.com:USERNAME/github-action-toolkit-python.git
    

    At this point the local clone of your fork only knows that it came from your repo, github.com/USERNAME/github-action-toolkit-python.git, but doesn’t know anything the main repo, https://github.com/VatsalJagani/github-action-toolkit-python.git. You can see this by running

     git remote -v
    

    which will output something like this:

     origin https://github.com/USERNAME/github-action-toolkit-python.git (fetch)
     origin https://github.com/USERNAME/github-action-toolkit-python.git (push)
    

    This means that your local clone can only track changes from your fork, but not from the main repo, and so you won’t be able to keep your fork up-to-date with the main repo over time. Therefore you’ll need to add another “remote” to your clone that points to https://github.com/VatsalJagani/github-action-toolkit-python.git. To do this, run the following:

     git remote add upstream https://github.com/VatsalJagani/github-action-toolkit-python.git
    

    Now if you do git remote -v again, you’ll see

     origin https://github.com/USERNAME/github-action-toolkit-python.git (fetch)
     origin https://github.com/USERNAME/github-action-toolkit-python.git (push)
     upstream https://github.com/VatsalJagani/github-action-toolkit-python.git (fetch)
     upstream https://github.com/VatsalJagani/github-action-toolkit-python.git (push)
    

Then Read the development.md file on GitHub for this project for development guidelines.

  1. Ensure your fork is up-to-date

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    Once you’ve added an “upstream” remote pointing to https://github.com/VatsalJagani/github-action-toolkit-python.git, keeping your fork up-to-date is easy:

     git checkout main  # if not already on main
     git pull --rebase upstream main
     git push
    
  2. Create a new branch to work on your fix or enhancement

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    Committing directly to the main branch of your fork is not recommended. It will be easier to keep your fork clean if you work on a separate branch for each contribution you intend to make.

    You can create a new branch with

     # replace BRANCH with whatever name you want to give it
     git checkout -b BRANCH
     git push -u origin BRANCH
    
  3. Test your changes

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    Before submitting a pull request:

    • Run tests: uv run pytest

    • Run linting: make lint or uv run python devtools/lint.py

    • Ensure your code builds: uv build

Then Read the development.md file on GitHub for this project for development guidelines.

Writing docstrings

We use Sphinx to build our API docs, which automatically parses all docstrings of public classes and methods using the autodoc extension. Please refer to autoc’s documentation to learn about the docstring syntax.