Coding style

If you follow the instructions to set up your development environment, the AiiDA coding style is largely enforced automatically using pre-commit hooks.

This document mainly acts as a reference.

AiiDA Coding Style

• Code should conform to the PEP8 guidelines (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/).
• When compatible, adhere to the Google Python Styleguide
• Concerning documentation, see Writing documentation
• Concerning tests, see Writing tests

AiiDA-specific conventions

• Opening files: In order to prepare for the end of Python 2 support
  • When opening a general file for reading or writing, use io.open, and specify UTF-8 encoding for formatted files ( e.g. io.open(path, 'w', encoding='utf8').
  • When opening a file from the AiiDA repository, use aiida.common.folders.Folder.open().

Source file headers

Each source file should start with a common header (will be added automatically by helper scripts that are run just before a new release):

1. Optional she-bang line e.g. #!/usr/bin/env python
2. Coding declaration conforming to PEP 263: e.g. # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
3. A copyright header defined below
4. Linter directives e.g. # pylint: disable=too-many-arguments
5. Module docstrings

The copyright header is currently defined to be:

###########################################################################
# Copyright (c), The AiiDA team. All rights reserved.                     #
# This file is part of the AiiDA code.                                    #
#                                                                         #
# The code is hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/aiidateam/aiida_core #
# For further information on the license, see the LICENSE.txt file        #
# For further information please visit http://www.aiida.net               #
###########################################################################