Contributing to NEMDataTools

First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute! ❤️

All types of contributions are encouraged and valued. See the Table of Contents for different ways to help and details about how this project handles them. Please make sure to read the relevant section before making your contribution. It will make it a lot easier for us maintainers and smooth out the experience for all involved. The community looks forward to your contributions. 🎉

And if you like the project, but just don’t have time to contribute, that’s fine. There are other easy ways to support the project and show your appreciation, which we would also be very happy about:

Star the project

Refer this project in your project’s readme

Mention the project at local meetups and tell your friends/colleagues

Code of Conduct

This project and everyone participating in it is governed by the NEMDataTools Code of Conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. Please report unacceptable behavior to github@zhipenghe.me.

I Have a Question

If you want to ask a question, we assume that you have read the available Documentation.

Before you ask a question, it is best to search for existing Issues that might help you. In case you have found a suitable issue and still need clarification, you can write your question in this issue. It is also advisable to search the internet for answers first.

If you then still feel the need to ask a question and need clarification, we recommend the following:

Open an Issue.
Provide as much context as you can about what you’re running into.
Provide project and platform versions (nodejs, npm, etc), depending on what seems relevant.

We will then take care of the issue as soon as possible.

I Want To Contribute

Legal Notice

When contributing to this project, you must agree that you have authored 100% of the content, that you have the necessary rights to the content and that the content you contribute may be provided under the project licence.

Reporting Bugs

Before Submitting a Bug Report

A good bug report shouldn’t leave others needing to chase you up for more information. Therefore, we ask you to investigate carefully, collect information and describe the issue in detail in your report. Please complete the following steps in advance to help us fix any potential bug as fast as possible.

Make sure that you are using the latest version.
Determine if your bug is really a bug and not an error on your side e.g. using incompatible environment components/versions (Make sure that you have read the documentation. If you are looking for support, you might want to check this section).
To see if other users have experienced (and potentially already solved) the same issue you are having, check if there is not already a bug report existing for your bug or error in the bug tracker.
Also make sure to search the internet (including Stack Overflow) to see if users outside of the GitHub community have discussed the issue.
Collect information about the bug:
- Stack trace (Traceback)
- OS, Platform and Version (Windows, Linux, macOS, x86, ARM)
- Version of the interpreter, compiler, SDK, runtime environment, package manager, depending on what seems relevant.
- Possibly your input and the output
- Can you reliably reproduce the issue? And can you also reproduce it with older versions?

How Do I Submit a Good Bug Report?

You must never report security related issues, vulnerabilities or bugs including sensitive information to the issue tracker, or elsewhere in public. Instead sensitive bugs must be sent by email to github@zhipenghe.me.

We use GitHub issues to track bugs and errors. If you run into an issue with the project:

Open an Issue.
Explain the behavior you would expect and the actual behavior.
Please provide as much context as possible and describe the reproduction steps that someone else can follow to recreate the issue on their own. This usually includes your code. For good bug reports you should isolate the problem and create a reduced test case.
Provide the information you collected in the previous section.

Once it’s filed:

The project team will label the issue accordingly.
A team member will try to reproduce the issue with your provided steps. If there are no reproduction steps or no obvious way to reproduce the issue, the team will ask you for those steps and mark the issue as needs-repro. Bugs with the needs-repro tag will not be addressed until they are reproduced.
If the team is able to reproduce the issue, it will be marked needs-fix, as well as possibly other tags (such as critical), and the issue will be left to be implemented by someone (see Development Setup to get started).

Suggesting Enhancements

This section guides you through submitting an enhancement suggestion for NEMDataTools, including completely new features and minor improvements to existing functionality. Following these guidelines will help maintainers and the community to understand your suggestion and find related suggestions.

Before Submitting an Enhancement

Make sure that you are using the latest version.
Read the documentation carefully and find out if the functionality is already covered, maybe by an individual configuration.
Perform a search to see if the enhancement has already been suggested. If it has, add a comment to the existing issue instead of opening a new one.
Find out whether your idea fits with the scope and aims of the project. It’s up to you to make a strong case to convince the project’s developers of the merits of this feature. Keep in mind that we want features that will be useful to the majority of our users and not just a small subset. If you’re just targeting a minority of users, consider writing an add-on/plugin library.

How Do I Submit a Good Enhancement Suggestion?

Enhancement suggestions are tracked as GitHub issues.

Use a clear and descriptive title for the issue to identify the suggestion.
Provide a step-by-step description of the suggested enhancement in as many details as possible.
Describe the current behavior and explain which behavior you expected to see instead and why. At this point you can also tell which alternatives do not work for you.
You may want to include screenshots or screen recordings which help you demonstrate the steps or point out the part which the suggestion is related to. You can use LICEcap to record GIFs on macOS and Windows, and the built-in screen recorder in GNOME or SimpleScreenRecorder on Linux.
Explain why this enhancement would be useful to most NEMDataTools users. You may also want to point out the other projects that solved it better and which could serve as inspiration.

Development Setup

The project uses uv and a committed lockfile (uv.lock) for dependency management. Requires Python 3.11+ (uv can install one for you).

git clone https://github.com/ZhipengHe/nemdatatools.git
cd nemdatatools
uv sync --locked --all-extras
uv run pre-commit install
uv run pre-commit install --hook-type commit-msg

uv sync --locked --all-extras creates .venv, installs the exact locked versions of the runtime, dev, and docs dependencies, and installs nemdatatools in editable mode. --locked fails if uv.lock is out of date with pyproject.toml instead of silently re-resolving — the same guarantee CI relies on. There is no need to activate the environment: prefix commands with uv run.

The second pre-commit install registers the commitizen hook that validates commit messages (see Commit Messages).

Running the Checks

uv run pytest                        # test suite
uv run pytest --cov=nemdatatools     # with coverage
uv run pre-commit run --all-files    # formatting, lint, typing, docstring coverage

Pre-commit runs black, isort, ruff, mypy, pyupgrade, and interrogate (docstring coverage) — the same checks CI runs, so a passing pre-commit run means a passing CI lint job.

Changing Dependencies

Edit the constraint in pyproject.toml (or run uv add <package>), then re-lock and sync:

uv lock
uv sync --locked --all-extras

Commit the pyproject.toml and uv.lock changes together — CI installs with uv sync --locked, so a stale lockfile fails the build. Routine version bumps arrive as monthly Dependabot PRs against uv.lock.

Commit Messages

Commit messages follow the Conventional Commits specification and are validated by the commitizen commit-msg hook. Either write them by hand (type(scope): subject, e.g. fix(core): skip missing months in the MMSDM escape hatch) or let commitizen prompt you:

uv run cz commit

Building the Documentation

The documentation is a Sphinx site under docs/, published to GitHub Pages on every push to master:

uv run sphinx-build -b html docs docs/_build/html
uv run python -m webbrowser docs/_build/html/index.html

Attribution

This guide is based on the contributing.md!
The ISSUE_TEMPLATE and PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE are adapted from LangFlow.