Development Guide

Read this guide before doing development in skrobot.

Setting Up

To set up the tools you’ll need for developing, you’ll need to install skrobot in development mode. Start by installing the development dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/iory/scikit-robot.git
cd scikit-robot
pip install -e .

Running Code Style Checks

We follow PEP 8 and partially OpenStack Style Guidelines as basic style guidelines. Any contributions in terms of code are expected to follow these guidelines.

You can use the autopep8, isort and the flake8 commands to check whether or not your code follows the guidelines. In order to avoid confusion from using different tool versions, we pin the versions of those tools. Install them with the following command (from within the top directory of the Chainer repository):

$ pip install hacking pytest autopep8 isort

And check your code with:

$ autopep8 path/to/your/code.py
$ flake8 path/to/your/code.py

autopep8 can automatically correct Python code to conform to the PEP 8 style guide:

$ autopep8 --in-place path/to/your/code.py

isort can automatically correct import order:

$ cd scikit-robot && isort path/to/your/code.py

For more information, please see the flake8 documentation.

Running Tests

This project uses pytest, the standard Python testing framework. Their website has tons of useful details, but here are the basics.

To run the testing suite, simply navigate to the top-level folder in scikit-robot and run the following command:

pytest -v tests

You should see the testing suite run. There are a few useful command line options that are good to know:

  • -s - Shows the output of stdout. By default, this output is masked.

  • --pdb - Instead of crashing, opens a debugger at the first fault.

  • --lf - Instead of running all tests, just run the ones that failed last.

  • --trace - Open a debugger at the start of each test.

You can see all of the other command-line options here.

By default, pytest will look in the tests folder recursively. It will run any function that starts with test_ in any file that starts with test_. You can run pytest on a directory or on a particular file by specifying the file path:

pytest -v tests/skrobot_tests/coordinates_tests/test_math.py

Building Documentation

To build scikit-robot’s documentation, go to the docs directory and run make with the appropriate target. For example,

cd docs/
make html

will generate HTML-based docs, which are probably the easiest to read. The resulting index page is at docs/build/html/index.html. If the docs get stale, just run make clean to remove all build files.