Contributing

Contributing to open source projects is a good way to advance one’s coding skills; it’s trying to create something, making mistakes, and learning from those mistakes. That’s how we all improve, and we are happy to help others learn.

Being an open source contributor doesn’t just mean writing code, either. You can help out by writing documentation, tests, or even giving feedback about the project (and yes - that includes giving feedback about the contribution process). Some of these contributions may be the most valuable to the project as a whole, because you’re coming to the project with fresh eyes, you can see the errors and assumptions that seasoned contributors have glossed over.

Issue Tracking

All bugs, feature requests, and other issues related to aiapy should be recorded using the GitHub issue tracker. You can find instructions for how to create an issue here.

All conversation regarding these issues should take place on the issue tracker. When a merge request resolves an issue, the issue will be closed and the appropriate merge request will be referenced. Issues will not be closed without a reason given.

Code

If you would like to contribute to aiapy, you will first need to setup your development environment.

We suggest reading through the SunPy developer’s guide for a more detailed description of the development process, as we follow there process for aiapy.

This will hopefully make it easier for you to contribute to aiapy and other SunPy affiliated packages in the future. If you encounter any problems, please don’t hesitate to ask for help on any of our communication channels (found on the landing page of the documentation).

Testing

There are several tests that require a working installation of sswidl in order to compare results from IDL and Python. This is managed via the hissw package. If you’d like to run these tests, you must first tell hissw where to find your IDL and SSW installations by placing the following lines in the file: $HOME/.hissw/hisswrc,

[hissw]
ssw_home=/path/to/ssw
idl_home=/another/path/to/idl

where ssw_home is the path to the top of the sswidl tree and idl_home is the path to a working installation of IDL. For more details, see the hissw documentation. If a working installation is not available, these tests are automatically skipped.

Standards

All contributors to the aiapy codebase should follow the SunPy developer’s guide. This guide lays out a set of best practices for contributing, reviewing, testing, and documenting code. All contributions to aiapy must adhere to the Python in Heliophysics Community Standards.