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Contributing Guide

Welcome! There are many ways to contribute, including submitting bug reports, improving documentation, submitting feature requests, reviewing new submissions, or contributing code that can be incorporated into the project.

Limitations

We should keep close to these items during development:

  • Some companies still use Python 3.10. So it is required to keep compatibility if possible, at least for client part of package.
  • Different users uses Horizon in different ways - someone store data in Postgres, someone in MySQL, some users need LDAP. Such dependencies should be optional.

Initial setup for local development

Install Git

Please follow instruction.

Create a fork

If you are not a member of a development team building horizon, you should create a fork before making any changes.

Please follow instruction.

Clone the repo

Open terminal and run these commands:

git clone https://github.com/MTSWebServices/horizon -b develop

cd horizon

Setup environment

Firstly, install make. It is used for running complex commands in local environment.

Secondly, create virtualenv and install dependencies:

make venv-init

If you already have venv, but need to install dependencies required for development:

make venv-install

We are using uv for managing dependencies and building the package. It allows to keep development environment the same for all developers due to using lock file with fixed dependency versions.

There are extra dependencies (included into package as optional):

  • backend
  • client-sync
  • postgres
  • ldap

And groups (not included into package, used locally and in CI):

  • test - for running tests
  • dev - for development, like linters, formatters, mypy, pre-commit and so on
  • mddocs - for building documentation

Enable pre-commit hooks

pre-commit hooks allows to validate & fix repository content before making new commit. It allows to run linters, formatters, fix file permissions and so on. If something is wrong, changes cannot be committed.

Firstly, install pre-commit hooks:

pre-commit install --install-hooks

And then test hooks run:

pre-commit run

How to

Run development instance locally

Start DB container:

make db

Then start development server:

make dev

And open http://localhost:8000/docs

Application settings are stored in config.yml. The .env.local.test file contains test-only environment variables.

Working with migrations

Start database:

make db-start

Generate revision:

make db-revision

Upgrade db to head migration:

make db-upgrade

Downgrade db to head-1 migration:

make db-downgrade

Run tests locally

Start all containers with dependencies:

make db  # for backend & client tests
make ldap-start  # for backend tests
make dev  # for client test, run in separate terminal tab

Run tests:

make test

You can pass additional arguments, they will be passed to pytest:

make test PYTEST_ARGS="-m client-sync -lsx -vvvv --log-cli-level=INFO"

Stop all containers and remove created volumes:

make cleanup ARGS="-v"

Get fixtures not used by any test:

make check-fixtures

Build CI image locally

This image is build in CI for testing purposes, but you can do that locally as well:

make test-build

Run production instance locally

Firstly, build production image:

make prod-build

And then start it:

make prod

Then open http://localhost:8000/docs

Application settings are stored in config.docker.yml. The .env.docker.test file contains test-only variables.

Build documentation

Build documentation using mkdocs:

make docs-serve

Then open in browser http://localhost:8000/

Review process

Please create a new GitHub issue for any significant changes and enhancements that you wish to make. Provide the feature you would like to see, why you need it, and how it will work. Discuss your ideas transparently and get community feedback before proceeding.

Significant Changes that you wish to contribute to the project should be discussed first in a GitHub issue that clearly outlines the changes and benefits of the feature.

Small Changes can directly be crafted and submitted to the GitHub Repository as a Pull Request.

Create pull request

Commit your changes:

git commit -m "Commit message"
git push

Then open Github interface and create pull request. Please follow guide from PR body template.

After pull request is created, it get a corresponding number, e.g. 123 (pr_number).

Write release notes

horizon uses towncrier for changelog management.

To submit a change note about your PR, add a text file into the mddocs/docs/changelog/next_release folder. It should contain an explanation of what applying this PR will change in the way end-users interact with the project. One sentence is usually enough but feel free to add as many details as you feel necessary for the users to understand what it means.

Use the past tense for the text in your fragment because, combined with others, it will be a part of the “news digest” telling the readers what changed in a specific version of the library since the previous version.

Finally, name your file following the convention that Towncrier understands: it should start with the number of an issue or a PR followed by a dot, then add a patch type, like feature, doc, misc etc., and add .md as a suffix. If you need to add more than one fragment, you may add an optional sequence number (delimited with another period) between the type and the suffix.

In general the name will follow <pr_number>.<category>.md pattern, where the categories are:

  • feature: Any new feature
  • bugfix: A bug fix
  • improvement: An improvement
  • doc: A change to the documentation
  • dependency: Dependency-related changes
  • misc: Changes internal to the repo like CI, test and build changes

A pull request may have more than one of these components, for example a code change may introduce a new feature that deprecates an old feature, in which case two fragments should be added. It is not necessary to make a separate documentation fragment for documentation changes accompanying the relevant code changes.

Examples for adding changelog entries to your Pull Requests

mddocs/docs/changelog/next_release/2345.bugfix.md
Fixed behavior of `backend`
mddocs/docs/changelog/next_release/3456.feature.md
Added support of `timeout` in `LDAP`

How to skip change notes check?

Just add ci:skip-changelog label to pull request.

Release Process

Before making a release from the develop branch, follow these steps:

  1. Checkout to develop branch and update it to the actual state
git checkout develop
git pull -p
  1. Get current release version
VERSION=$(cat horizon/VERSION)
  1. Build changelog for current release
make docs-generate-changelog
  1. Commit and push changes to develop branch
git add .
git commit -m "Prepare for release ${VERSION}"
git push
  1. Merge develop branch to master, WITHOUT squashing
git checkout master
git pull
git merge develop
git push
  1. Add git tag to the latest commit in master branch
git tag "$VERSION"
git push origin "$VERSION"
  1. Update version in develop branch after release:
git checkout develop

NEXT_VERSION=$(echo "$VERSION" | awk -F. '/[0-9]+\./{$NF++;print}' OFS=.)
echo $NEXT_VERSION > horizon/VERSION

git add .
git commit -m "Bump version"
git push