Contributing Guide

Development status

While the original author no longer has time to work on requests-cache (see note here), one or more maintainers are available via Code Shelter to help keep this project going.

Maintenance will mainly focus on bugfixes, security and compatibility updates, etc. If there is a new feature you would like to see, the best way to make that happen is to submit a PR for it!

Bug Reports & Feedback

If you discover a bug, want to propose a new feature, or have other feedback about requests-cache, please create an issue!

Project Discussion

If you want to discuss ideas about the project in general, or if you have an issue or PR that hasn’t received a response in a timely manner, please reach out on the Code Shelter chat server, under projects/requests-cache.

Dev Installation

To set up for local development:

$ git clone https://github.com/reclosedev/requests-cache.git
$ cd requests-cache
$ pip install -Ue ".[dev]"

Pre-commit Hooks

Pre-commit config is included to run the same checks locally that are run in CI jobs by GitHub Actions. This is optional but recommended.

$ pre-commit install --config .github/pre-commit.yml

To uninstall:

$ pre-commit uninstall

Testing

Test Layout

  • Tests are divided into unit and integration tests:

    • Unit tests can be run without any additional setup, and don’t depend on any external services.

    • Integration tests depend on additional services, which are easiest to run using Docker (see Integration Tests section below).

  • See conftest.py for pytest fixtures that apply the most common mocking steps and other test setup.

Running Tests

  • Run pytest to run all tests

  • Run pytest tests/unit to run only unit tests

  • Run pytest tests/integration to run only integration tests

  • Run ./runtests.sh to run all tests with some useful options for test coverage reports, multiprocessing, and debugging.

Integration Test Containers

A live web server and backend databases are required to run integration tests, and docker-compose config is included to make this easier. First, install docker and install docker-compose.

Then, run:

$ docker-compose up -d
pytest tests/integration

Integration Test Alternatives

If you can’t easily run Docker containers in your environment but still want to run some of the integration tests, you can use pytest-httpbin instead of the httpbin container. This just requires installing an extra package and setting an environment variable:

pip install pytest-httpbin
export USE_PYTEST_HTTPBIN=true
pytest tests/integration/test_cache.py

For backend databases, you can install and run them on the host instead of in a container, as long as they are running on the default port.

Documentation

Sphinx is used to generate documentation.

To build the docs locally:

$ make -C docs all

To preview:

# MacOS:
$ open docs/_build/index.html
# Linux:
$ xdg-open docs/_build/index.html

Readthedocs

Sometimes, there are differences in the Readthedocs build environment that can cause builds to succeed locally but fail remotely. To help debug this, you can use the readthedocs/build container to build the docs. A configured build container is included in docs/docker-compose.yml to simplify this.

Run with:

# Optionally add --build to rebuild with updated dependencies
docker-compose -f docs/docker-compose.yml up -d
docker exec readthedocs make all

Pull Requests

Here are some general guidelines for submitting a pull request:

  • If the changes are trivial, just briefly explain the changes in the PR description.

  • Otherwise, please submit an issue describing the proposed change prior to submitting a PR.

  • Please add unit test coverage and updated docs (if applicable) for your changes.

  • Submit the PR to be merged into the master branch.

Releases

Notes for maintainers:

  • Releases are built and published to pypi based on git tags.

  • Milestones will be used to track progress on major and minor releases.

  • GitHub Actions will build and deploy packages to PyPi on tagged commits on the master branch.

Release steps:

  • Update the version in requests_cache/__init__.py

  • Update the release notes in HISTORY.md

  • Merge changes into the master branch

  • Push a new tag, e.g.: git tag v0.1 && git push origin --tags

  • This will trigger a deployment. Verify that this completes successfully and that the new version can be installed from pypi with pip install

Pre-Releases

Pre-release builds are convenient for letting testers try out in-development changes. Versions with the suffix .dev (among others) can be deployed to PyPI and installed by users with pip install --pre, and are otherwise ignored by pip install. See python packaging docs on pre-release versioning for more details.

A pre-release build for requests-cache will automatically be published for any commits to the dev branch.