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 Bugs

Report bugs at https://github.com/astropy/specutils/issues.

If you are reporting a bug, please include:

  • Your operating system name and version.

  • 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.

Implement Features

Look through the GitHub issues for features. Anything tagged with “enhancement” and “help wanted” is open to whoever wants to implement it.

Write Documentation

Specutils could always use more documentation, whether as part of the official specutils docs, in docstrings, or even on the web in blog posts, articles, and such.

Submit Feedback

The best way to send feedback is to file an issue at https://github.com/astropy/specutils/issues.

If you are proposing a feature:

  • Explain in detail how it would work.

  • Keep the scope as narrow as possible, to make it easier to implement.

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

Get Started!

Ready to contribute? Here’s how to set up specutils for local development.

  1. Fork the specutils repo on GitHub.

  2. Clone your fork locally:

    $ git clone git@github.com:your_name_here/specutils.git
    
  3. Install your local copy, preferably into some sort of virtual environment using your preferred environment manager. For example, using conda:

    $ conda create --name specutils-dev python=3.11 pip
    $ conda activate specutils-dev
    $ cd specutils/
    $ pip install -e .'[test]'
    
  4. Create a branch for local development:

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

    Now you can make your changes locally.

  5. When you’re done making changes, check that your changes pass flake8 and the tests:

    $ tox -e codestyle
    $ pytest
    

The tests will run on other Python versions automatically on opening a pull request, but if you want to attempt to run the full test suite locally before doing so you can run tox:

$ tox
  1. 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
    
  2. Submit a pull request through the GitHub website.

Pull Request Guidelines

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

  1. The pull request should include tests.

  2. If the pull request adds functionality, the docs should be updated. Put your new functionality into a function with a docstring, and add the feature to the list in README.rst.

  3. The pull request should work for Python 3.9 - 3.11, and for PyPy. Check that all required tests passed in the Github Actions CI section at the bottom of your pull request.

Tips

To run a subset of the tests, you can call pytest with a specific file provided as input. For example. from the base directory of a cloned specutils repository, you could run:

$ pytest specutils/tests/test_regions.py

You can also run a specific test defined within a file using the -k flag, for example:

$ pytest specutils/tests/test_regions.py -k test_invert