CONTRIBUTING.md

We welcome contributions to the project and we could really use your help to:

• Investigate and fix reported bugs

• Improve the workflow

• Improve the documentation

• Increase test coverage

All contributions must follow the Stan AI Contribution Policy.

Developers

We welcome contributions! Contributions should follow the general outlines of the Stan Developer Process

• GitHub issues are used to discuss both bugs and features and propose implementations.

• Additions and changes to the code base should include updates to unit tests. User-facing changes require updates to the documentation as well.

• The GitHub repo organization follows the gitflow model described by Vincent Driessen in the blog post "A successful Git branching model.". The main developer branch is develop; it should always be runnable.

• Unit tests must be runnable under the PyTest framework, and must pass against the latest release of CmdStan.

• Both PyLint and Flake8 are used to check code style and formatting according to rules in https://github.com/stan-dev/cmdstanpy/blob/develop/.pylintrc and https://github.com/stan-dev/cmdstanpy/blob/a6e09190af555aa6d05993d630ebf39a3d4bb867/.travis.yml#L30. Code is formatted with isort and black.

• We recommend using pre-commit to ensure the above code style and quality checks are run whenever you make code edits. You can run pre-commit install from this directory to install these hooks. Note: both pre-commit and pylint need to be installed before running this command.

Documentation

CmdStanPy uses Sphinx to generate the docs.

• Documentation src files live in directory docsrc

• The documentation is hosted on readthedocs as https://cmdstanpy.readthedocs.io, which provides documentation for all tagged releases.

  • The stable branch is the most recent tagged version

  • The latest branch is the current develop branch

  • Readthedocs automation rules are used to generate docs for new tags.

• The current develop branch docset in the docs directory is hosted by GitHub pages as https://mc-stan.org/cmdstanpy The Sphinx makefile docsrc/Makefile target github is used to update the contents of the docs directory.