Developer documentation

If you're looking for user documentation, go here.

Development install

Install copier in user space

We recommend installing copier in user space. This way, you don't have to install copier for every new project.

shell python -m pip install --user --upgrade copier

Get your own copy of the repository

Before you can do development work on the template, you'll need to check out a local copy of the repository:

shell cd <where you keep your GitHub repositories> git clone https://github.com/NLeSC/python-template.git cd python-template

Please note that if you are working from some other branch than main, you should switch to that branch. For example, if you are working from the dev branch, you should do:

shell git fetch origin git switch -c dev origin/dev

Create a virtual environment

Next, make a virtual environment, activate it, and install the development dependencies in it. This will enable you to run the tests later.

```shell

Create a virtual environment, e.g. with

python -m venv env

activate virtual environment

source env/bin/activate

make sure to have a recent version of pip and setuptools

python -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools

(from the project root directory)

install development dependencies

python -m pip install --no-cache-dir .[dev] ```

Running the tests

Running the tests requires an activated virtual environment with the development tools installed.

```shell

unit tests

pytest pytest tests/ ```

Using copier to generate a new package from the command line

While making changes to the template, you'll regularly want to verify that the packages generated with the template still work. Any easy way to do this is to generate new packages in a temporary directory (which will get removed everytime you reboot), for example like so:

```shell

change directory to a new temporary directory

cd $(mktemp -d --tmpdir copier-generated.XXXXXX)

run copier with the template to generate a new package

copier copy --vcs-ref HEAD my-python-project

when it asks you for the GitHub organization, put in your own name;

for the other questions, just accept the default

'ls' should return just the one directory called 'my-python-project'

ls `` Notice, that the--vcs-ref HEAD` flag is used to make sure that the current checked out version of the local template is used.

If your Python package was created successfully, copier will point you to a file (my-python-project/next_steps.md) that contains information on next steps.

In addition to the information in my-python-project/project_setup.md, the developer documentation my-python-project/README.dev.md contains information on a few more things to check, for example:

1. generating my-python-project's documentation locally
2. running my-python-project's tests locally
3. running my-python-project's linters locally
4. verifying that the my-python-project's version can be updated using bump-my-version
5. making a release of my-python-project on https://test.pypi.org/

Follow the instructions from my-python-project/README.dev.md and make sure that everything works.

Making a release

Preparation

1. Make sure the CHANGELOG.md has been updated
2. Verify that the information in CITATION.cff is correct.
3. Make sure that version in setup.cfg and version in CITATION.cff have been bumped to the to-be-released version of the template
4. Run the unit tests with pytest tests/
5. Go through the steps outlined above for generating a new package from the command line, and verify that the generated package works as it should.

GitHub

1. Make sure that the GitHub-Zenodo integration is enabled for https://github.com/NLeSC/python-template
2. Go to https://github.com/NLeSC/python-template/releases and click Draft a new release