Contributing to pydantic

We'd love you to contribute to pydantic! It should be extremely simple to get started and create a Pull Request. pydantic is released regularly so you should see your improvements release in a matter of days or weeks.

Note

Unless your change is trivial (typo, docs tweak etc.), please create an issue to discuss the change before creating a pull request.

If you're looking for something to get your teeth into, check out the "help wanted" label on github.

To make contributing as easy and fast as possible, you'll want to run tests and linting locally. Luckily, pydantic has few dependencies, doesn't require compiling and tests don't need access to databases, etc. Because of this, setting up and running the tests should be very simple.

You'll need to have python 3.6, 3.7, or 3.8, virtualenv, git, and make installed.

# 1. clone your fork and cd into the repo directory
git clone git@github.com:<your username>/pydantic.git
cd pydantic

# 2. Set up a virtualenv for running tests
virtualenv -p `which python3.7` env
source env/bin/activate
# (or however you prefer to setup a python environment, 3.6 will work too)

# 3. Install pydantic, dependencies and test dependencies
make install

# 4. Checkout a new branch and make your changes
git checkout -b my-new-feature-branch
# make your changes...

# 5. Fix formatting and imports
make format
# Pydantic uses black to enforce formatting and isort to fix imports
# (https://github.com/ambv/black, https://github.com/timothycrosley/isort)

# 6. Run tests and linting
make
# there are a few sub-commands in Makefile like `test`, `testcov` and `lint`
# which you might want to use, but generally just `make` should be all you need

# 7. Build documentation
make docs
# if you have changed the documentation make sure it builds successfully
# you can also use `make docs-serve` to serve the documentation at localhost:8000

# ... commit, push, and create your pull request

tl;dr: use make format to fix formatting, make to run tests and linting & make docs to build the docs.