BEC is a Beamline Experiment Control system that relies on multiple small services for orchestrating and steering the experiment at large research facilities. The usage of small services allows for a more modular system and facilitates the long-term maintainability.

The system is designed to be deployed at large research facilities where the interoperability with other systems is a key requirement. As shown in the figure below, the system can be connected to other services such as an electronic logbook, a data catalogue / archiving solution or a data processing pipeline. More services can be added easily by using the provided bec library.

Documentation

The documentation is hosted here: https://beamline-experiment-control.readthedocs.io/ and here: https://bec.readthedocs.io/

Contributing

Thank you for considering contributing to BEC! Contributions are essential for improving the project and helping it grow. We welcome your bug reports and feature requests via GitLab issues, as well as contribution for documentation improvements, and code extensions or improvements.

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. Be sure to provide steps to reproduce bugs, including package version of the deployed BEC services (e.g. bec_lib) and information of your operating system, which will increase chances of reproducing and fixing the reported bug.

Contributing Code:

If you are keen on contributing new code developments to BEC, please follow the guidelines on how to push code changes back into the BEC repository. To start with, you will first have to clone the repository to your local system as described in the installation guide for developers and create a bec_venv with the developer ([dev]) extensions.

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

Create a new branch for your changes:
```
git checkout -b feature/your-feature
```
Make your changes.

Use Black to format your code:

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

Use isort to sort your imports:

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

Run Pylint on your code to ensure it meets coding standards:
```
pylint your_module_or_package
```
Write tests for new features or fixed bugs, and add them to the test folder. We use pytest within our team to test code.
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"
```
Push your commits to the remote branch:
```
git push origin feature/your-feature
```
Open a merge request on GitLab. Be sure to include a clear title and description of your changes. If your merge request fixes an issue, include closes #123 in the description to automatically close the issue when the merge request is merged.

Contributing Documentation:

Improvements to documentation are always appreciated! If you find a typo or think something could be explained better, please open an issue or merge request.
If you are adding new documentation, please follow the same steps as contributing code above.