Contributing

Contributions are welcome, and they are greatly appreciated! Every little bit helps, and credit will always be given.

You can contribute in many ways:

Types of Contributions

Report Errors

Report errors as an issue at github.

If you are reporting an error, please include:

• Any details about your local setup that might be helpful in troubleshooting.

• Detailed steps to reproduce the bug.

Fix Bugs

Look through the GitHub issues for bugs. Anything tagged with “bug” and “help wanted” is open to whoever wants to implement it. You might also encounter typos, spelling and grammar errors, we appreciate all help we can get to make this the best learning experience possible, so don’t be shy and contribute. :)

Implement Topics

Look through the GitHub issues for features. Anything tagged with “enhancement” and “help wanted” is open to whoever wants to implement it. Tell us that you are working on this topic, so the same work won’t be done by two people at the same time. Of course if someone is already working on a topic you can always offer your help.

Write TL;DR’s or Examples

We will leave the writing of TL;DR’s and examples mostly to the community, since this is the perfect opportunity for you to get involved. Not only is it a great start to work with git on an open source project, it will also help you to amplify your understanding of the tools we are teaching you. If you are writing examples make sure that they are documented (markdown cells) and explain what/why it is being done. Also make sure that the example you are using isn’t so specific to your field of studying, that others will have problems understanding (i.e. no detailed knowledge of quantum mechanics should be needed to understand your example.)

Submit Feedback

The best way to send feedback, is to file an issue at Github.

If you are proposing a topic:

• Explain in detail what you would want to learn and why it should be included.

• Keep the scope as narrow as possible and add an example, to make it easier to implement.

• Remember that this is a volunteer-driven project, and that contributions are welcome :)

Structure of the project

If you don’t know which number the chapter you want to work on should have, have a look at issue #3, where the structuring of the course is discussed.

To make navigating through the material consistent and also give new (and old) contributors a good starting point on how to organize and name files and folders, the following structure was proposed in issue #9:

Repository-root
|-- material
    |-- <chapter_nr>_<chapter_name>
        |-- data
        |-- images
        |-- <chapter_nr>_<chapter_name>.ipynb
        |-- TL_DR.md
        |-- additional_materials.md
        |-- code_snippets.md
        |-- Examples
            |-- data
                |-- <data_description>-example1.txt
                |-- ...
            |-- example1.ipynb
            |-- ...
    |-- cheat_sheets.md
    |-- tutorials.md
|-- docs
    |-- material
        |-- <chapter_nr>_<chapter_name>
           |-- <chapter_nr>_<chapter_name>.nblink
    |-- examples
        |-- <chapter_nr>_<chapter_name>
           |-- example1.nblink

Getting Started!

Ready to contribute? Here’s how to set up python-tools-for-students for local development.

1. Fork the python-tools-for-students repo on GitHub.

2. Clone your fork locally:

   $ git clone git@github.com:your_name_here/python-tools-for-students.git

3. Create a branch for local development:

   $ git checkout -b name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature

   Now you can make your changes locally.

4. Install all required libraries:

   $ pip install -r requirements_dev.txt

5. Start jupyter lab in the folder of your local copy and write the changes you want.

6. Make sure all tests pass:

   $ tox

7. Commit your changes and push your branch to GitHub:

   $ git add .

   $ git commit -m "Your detailed description of your changes."

   $ git push origin name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature

8. Submit a pull request through the GitHub website.

Note

You might need to install git if you haven’t done so before. Especially for beginners we recommend GitKraken, which is a graphical user interface for git. But you should definitely learn how to work with git in a terminal, since you might have to work in an environment where you won’t have a graphical user interface (i.e. ssh connection to a server/cluster where you want to do your calculation on) or something doesn’t work as expected and you need to fix it.

Note for Windows users:

If you want the care free package of a ‘properly’ configured Posix like shell (more powerful and feature rich command line), just install cmder full with get-cmder.

Testing

To make sure that all our notebooks are working properly and have a uniform code style, we test them with:

• tox

• pytest

• nbval

• flake8-nb

Where tox, pytest and nbval ensure that the provided notebooks reproducibly work with all supported python versions and flake8-nb ensures the code style.

nbval

In some cases the output might depend on the operating system/current time or you want to showcase an Exception, in those cases you can use Tags (meta information) to mark a cell for nbval to change its testing behavior. For more information have a look at nbval’s documentation Avoid output comparison for specific cells and Using tags instead of comments .

flake8-nb

As for nbval we also encourage to use cell tags to configure the reported code style violations of flake8-nb. Please only use this scarcely and when absolutely needed, i.e. if you have a cell with different language code or if you want to showcase bad code.

Add your changes to the docs

To make the provided information more accessible (i.e. on mobile when you are on your way to university), we also generate documentation as an html page, PDF and epub, which is published at Read The Docs.

Adding notebooks

Notebooks are included in the docs using nbsphinx and nbsphinx-link. In order to add a notebook to the docs, you need to create a *.nblink file in the appropriate folder in the docs and add its path to docs/material.rst / docs/examples.rst. If your notebooks contain extra media like images, you need to add them as extra-media entry in the *.nblink file.

Adding markdown files

Markdown files are included in the docs using myst-parser. Sadly sphinx does not recognize files outside of the docs root folder (docs). So in order not to copy files and maintain two versions, the best solution is to create a new file inside the docs folder with the following code, pointing to the appropriate file.

```{include} <relative_path_to_the_file_to_be_included>

```

After that you can include it in any *.rst file as you would normally.

Building the docs locally

To build the documentation, open a terminal, navigate to the docs folder and run make html (Posix like) / make.bat html (Windows). This will create the documentation inside the folder docs/_build/html.

Note

For the docs to be build it is mandatory that you use a conda installation of python or at least have conda installed. This is due to the fact that the notebook inclusion in the docs utilizes the tool pandoc. Even so pandoc is present in many package manager repository indices, this is mostly a too old version, which is why we recommend to use the version provided by conda.

$ conda install -c conda-forge pandoc

This also requires that the terminal you execute the make command with knows about the conda binary path/s (see Using Anaconda only if needed).

Note for Windows users:

If you are on Windows and want to use git bash for Windows, you might not have the make command installed. To install make into git bash you can follow this guide or use install_make_git_bash_standalone.bat from get-cmder.

Style guide

To make the learning and reading experience as pleasant and uniform as possible, as well as giving you pointers to possible pitfalls, we added this style guide. Before you write new content you should check back here, see if something has changed and also refresh your memory on what the style rules for this project are.

• Always capitalize keys for keyboard shortcuts (i.e. Shift+Ctrl)

• Always write commands which can be executed in lower case (i.e. Jupiter-lab should be jupyter-lab)

• No starting or tailing whitespaces in inline equations markdown cells (i.e.$ \int $ should be $\int$), since this will break in the docs (see)

Pull Request Guidelines

Before you submit a pull request, check that it meets these guidelines:

• Respect our folder structure and style guide, since this guarantees a consistent and easy to navigate experience for everyone.

• Make sure that the notebooks work, when running Restart Kernel and Run All ... and the tests pass.

• If your code needs a 3rd party library to work and it is not yet present in the requirements.txt,

  please add it with a minimum version (i.e.: package_name>=1.0.0 ).

• Add your changes to the docs and make sure that they render properly.