CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to the Data Retriever

We welcome contributions of all kinds including improvements to the core code, addition of new dataset scripts to add new datasets to the Retriever, improvements to the documentation, bug reports, or anything else you can think of. We strive to be supportive of anyone who wants to contribute, so don't be shy, give it a go, and we'll do our best to help. One way to ease into contributing is to add datasets to the Retriever.

Process for contributing changes

We use a standard GitHub flow for development and reviewing contributions. Fork the repository. Make changes to a branch of your fork and then submit a pull request.

Running the tests

We use nose for testing. To run the tests first install nose using pip:

pip install nose

Then from the root of the repository install the Retriever:

python setup.py install

and run the tests:

nosetests

You should see a bunch of output from the Retriever followed by something like:

.....................
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 32 tests in 143.621s

OK

Tests for MySQL and PostgreSQL require properly configured database management systems for testing.

Postgres setup

Requires that the postgres user has permissions on a database named testdb from localhost. This login information should be stored in the postgreSQL password file.

MySQL setup

Requires that the travis user has permissions on a database named testdb from localhost.

Continuous integration

We use Travis CI for continuous integration testing. All pull requests will automatically report whether the tests are passing.

Our postgreSQL tests fail idiosyncratically on Travis, so if only the postgres tests are failing it on Travis, and they are passing locally, it is likely not a problem.