bec/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Thank you for considering contributing to BEC. Contributions are essential for improving the project and helping it grow. We welcome bug reports and feature requests via GitHub issues, as well as contributions to the code base and the documentation.

Reporting Bugs or Requesting Features

• Before submitting a bug report or feature request, please check the issue tracker to avoid duplication.
• If the issue or feature hasn't been reported, open a new issue with a clear title and description. For bug reports, include reproduction steps, the package versions of the deployed BEC services (for example bec_lib), and details about your operating system. This significantly improves the chance that we can reproduce and fix the problem quickly.

Contributing Code

If you want to contribute code to BEC, please work against the BEC repository. Before starting, clone the repository locally and set up a developer environment using the installation instructions in the separate documentation repository bec-project/bec_docs or the published installation guide at bec.readthedocs.io/latest/how-to/general/install-bec-locally.html.

Afterwards, you may follow this step-by-step guide to suggest your code improvements:

1. Create a new branch for your changes:

   git checkout -b feature/your-feature
   

2. Make your changes.

3. Use Black to format your code:

   black --line-length=100 --skip-magic-trailing-comma .
   

4. Use isort to sort your imports:

   isort --line-length=100 --profile=black --multi-line=3 --trailing-comma .
   

5. Run Pylint on your code to ensure it meets coding standards:

   pylint your_module_or_package
   

6. Write tests for new features or fixed bugs, and add them to the test folder. We use pytest within our team to test code.

7. Follow Conventional Commit Messages when writing commit messages. This helps us automatically generate a changelog. For example:

   git commit -m "feat: add new feature"
   

   or

   git commit -m "fix: fix bug"
   

   or

   git commit -m "docs: update documentation"
   

8. Push your commits to the remote branch:

   git push origin feature/your-feature
   

9. Open a pull request on GitHub. Include a clear title and description of your changes. If your pull request fixes an issue, include closes #123 in the description to automatically close the issue when the pull request is merged.

Contributing Documentation

• Improvements to the documentation are always appreciated.
• BEC documentation and installation instructions are maintained in the separate repository bec-project/bec_docs and are published at bec.readthedocs.org.
• If you find a typo, missing explanation, or outdated installation step, please open an issue or pull request in bec_docs.
• For documentation changes, follow the same general workflow as for code contributions: create a branch, make the change in bec_docs, and open a pull request there.