How to contribute
#################

There are many ways to contribute to Pelican. You can improve the
documentation, add missing features, and fix bugs (or just report them). You
can also help out by reviewing and commenting on
`existing issues <https://github.com/getpelican/pelican/issues>`_.

Don't hesitate to fork Pelican and submit a pull request on GitHub. When doing
so, please adhere to the following guidelines.

.. include:: ../CONTRIBUTING.rst

Setting up the development environment
======================================

While there are many ways to set up one's development environment, following
is a method that uses `virtualenv <http://www.virtualenv.org/>`_. If you don't
have ``virtualenv`` installed, you can install it via::

    $ pip install virtualenv

Virtual environments allow you to work on Python projects which are isolated
from one another so you can use different packages (and package versions) with
different projects.

To create and activate a virtual environment, use the following syntax::

    $ virtualenv ~/virtualenvs/pelican
    $ cd ~/virtualenvs/pelican
    $ . bin/activate

To clone the Pelican source::

    $ git clone https://github.com/getpelican/pelican.git src/pelican

To install the development dependencies::

    $ cd src/pelican
    $ pip install -r dev_requirements.txt

To install Pelican and its dependencies::

    $ python setup.py develop

Coding standards
================

Try to respect what is described in the `PEP8 specification
<http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/>`_ when making contributions. This
can be eased via the `pep8 <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pep8>`_ or `flake8
<http://pypi.python.org/pypi/flake8/>`_ tools, the latter of which in
particular will give you some useful hints about ways in which the
code/formatting can be improved.

Building the docs
=================

If you make changes to the documentation, you should preview your changes
before committing them::

    $ pip install sphinx
    $ cd src/pelican/docs
    $ make html

Open ``_build/html/index.html`` in your browser to preview the documentation.

Running the test suite
======================

Each time you add a feature, there are two things to do regarding tests:
check that the existing tests pass, and add tests for the new feature
or bugfix.

The tests live in ``pelican/tests`` and you can run them using the
"discover" feature of ``unittest``::

    $ python -m unittest discover

After making your changes and running the tests, you may see a test failure
mentioning that "some generated files differ from the expected functional tests
output." If you have made changes that affect the HTML output generated by
Pelican, and the changes to that output are expected and deemed correct given
the nature of your changes, then you should update the output used by the
functional tests. To do so, you can use the following two commands::

    $ pelican -o pelican/tests/output/custom/ -s samples/pelican.conf.py \
        samples/content/
    $ pelican -o pelican/tests/output/basic/ samples/content/

Testing on Python 3.x
---------------------

Testing on Python 3.x currently requires some extra steps: installing
Python 3.x-compatible versions of dependent packages and plugins.

However, you must tell ``tox`` to use those Python 3.x-compatible libraries.
If you forget this, ``tox`` will pull the regular packages from PyPI, and the
tests will fail.

Tell ``tox`` about the local packages thusly: enter the source directory of
smartypants and run ``tox`` there. Do this again for the ``typogrify`` and
``webassets`` packages. SmartyPants and Typogrify do not have real tests, and
``webassets`` will fail noisily, but as a result we get these libraries neatly
packaged in tox's ``distshare`` directory, which we need in order to run
``tox`` for Pelican.

Python 3.x development tips
===========================

Here are some tips that may be useful when doing some code for both Python 2.7
and Python 3.x at the same time:

- Assume every string and literal is unicode (import unicode_literals):

  - Do not use prefix ``u'``.
  - Do not encode/decode strings in the middle of sth. Follow the code to the
    source (or target) of a string and encode/decode at the first/last possible
    point.
  - In other words, write your functions to expect and to return unicode.
  - Encode/decode strings if e.g. the source is a Python function that is known
    to handle this badly, e.g. strftime() in Python 2.

- Use new syntax: print function, "except ... *as* e" (not comma) etc.
- Refactor method calls like ``dict.iteritems()``, ``xrange()`` etc. in a way
  that runs without code change in both Python versions.
- Do not use magic method ``__unicode()__`` in new classes. Use only ``__str()__``
  and decorate the class with ``@python_2_unicode_compatible``.
- Do not start int literals with a zero. This is a syntax error in Py3k.
- Unfortunately I did not find an octal notation that is valid in both
  Pythons. Use decimal instead.
- use six, e.g.:

  - ``isinstance(.., basestring) -> isinstance(.., six.string_types)``
  - ``isinstance(.., unicode) -> isinstance(.., six.text_type)``

- ``setlocale()`` in Python 2 bails when we give the locale name as unicode,
  and since we are using ``from __future__ import unicode_literals``, we do
  that everywhere!  As a workaround, I enclosed the localename with ``str()``;
  in Python 2 this casts the name to a byte string, in Python 3 this should do
  nothing, because the locale name already had been unicode.

- Kept range() almost everywhere as-is (2to3 suggests list(range())), just
  changed it where I felt necessary.

- Changed xrange() back to range(), so it is valid in both Python versions.