How to Contribute

Want to contribute? Great! First, read this page (including the small print at the end).

Before you contribute

Before we can use your code, you must sign the Google Individual Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which you can do online. The CLA is necessary mainly because you own the copyright to your changes, even after your contribution becomes part of our codebase, so we need your permission to use and distribute your code. We also need to be sure of various other things—for instance that you'll tell us if you know that your code infringes on other people's patents. You don't have to sign the CLA until after you've submitted your code for review and a member has approved it, but you must do it before we can put your code into our codebase. Before you start working on a larger contribution, you should get in touch with us first through the issue tracker with your idea so that we can help out and possibly guide you. Coordinating up front makes it much easier to avoid frustration later on.

Code reviews

All submissions, including submissions by project members, require review. We use Github pull requests for this purpose.

YAPF coding style

YAPF follows the Google Python Style Guide with two exceptions:

• 2 spaces for indentation rather than 4.
• CamelCase for function and method names rather than snake_case.

The rationale for this is that YAPF was initially developed at Google where these two exceptions are still part of the internal Python style guide.

Getting started

YAPF supports using tox 3 for creating a local dev environment, testing, and building redistributables. See HACKING.md for more info.

$ pipx run --spec='tox<4' tox --devenv .venv

Small print

Contributions made by corporations are covered by a different agreement than the one above, the Software Grant and Corporate Contributor License Agreement.