Developers’ Guide

Note

The documentation guide (how to write a good documentation, naming conventions, docstring examples) is in Documentation Guide.

  1. Follow the instructions in Prerequisites to setup a clean conda environment. To be safe, run:

    $ pip uninstall elephant

    to uninstall elephant in case you’ve installed it previously as a pip package.

  2. Fork Elephant as described in Fork a repo. Download Elephant source code from your forked repo:

    $ git clone git://github.com/<your-github-profile>/elephant.git
$ cd elephant

  3. Install requirements.txt, (optionally) requirements-extras.txt, and requirements-tests.txt:

    $ pip install -r requirements/requirements.txt
$ pip install -r requirements/requirements-extras.txt  # optional
$ pip install -r requirements/requirements-tests.txt

  4. Before you make any changes, run the test suite to make sure all the tests pass on your system:

    $ nosetests .

    You can specify a particular module to test, for example test_statistics.py:

    $ nosetests elephant/test/test_statistics.py

    At the end, if you see “OK”, then all the tests passed (or were skipped because certain dependencies are not installed), otherwise it will report on tests that failed or produced errors.

  5. Implement the functional you want to add in Elephant. This includes (either of them):

    • fixing a bug;
    • improving the documentation;
    • adding a new functional.

  6. If it was a new functional, please write:

    • documentation (refer to Documentation Guide);
    • tests to cover your new functions as much as possible.

  7. Run the tests again as described in step 4.

  8. Commit your changes:

    $ git add .
$ git commit -m "informative commit message"
$ git push

    If this is your first commit to the project, please add your name and affiliation/employer to doc/authors.rst

  9. Open a pull request. Then we’ll merge your code in Elephant.

Note

If you experience a problem during one of the steps above, please contact us by Get in touch with us.