Contributing¶

Contributions are welcome, and they are greatly appreciated! Every little bit helps, and credit will always be given.

You can contribute in many ways:

Types of Contributions¶

Report Bugs¶

Report bugs at https://github.com/biglocalnews/civic-scraper/issues.

If you are reporting a bug, please include:

Your operating system name and version.
Any details about your local setup that might be helpful in troubleshooting.
Detailed steps to reproduce the bug.

Fix Bugs¶

Look through the GitHub issues for bugs. Anything tagged with “bug” and “help wanted” is open to whoever wants to implement it.

Implement Features¶

Look through the GitHub issues for features. Anything tagged with “enhancement” and “help wanted” is open to whoever wants to implement it.

Do Research¶

This project involves a fair bit of research, especially with respect to locating platforms and sites to scrape. Research jobs are great ways to get involved if you don’t write code but still want to pitch in. Anything tagged with the “research” and “help wanted” labels on GitHub is fair game.

Write Documentation¶

civic-scraper could always use more documentation, whether as part of the official civic-scraper docs, in docstrings, or even on the web in blog posts, articles, and such.

Our official docs use restructuredText and Sphinx. To contribute documentation:

Fork and clone this repo
Create a virtual environment and perform the next steps inside an active venv
pip install -r requirements.txt and pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
Create a branch for your doc updates and start writing!
Use make docs to build docs and/or use make servedocs commands to run a Sphinx server that displays doc pages and allows easier reloading of pages in browser
Create a GitHub Pull Request once you’re ready to send us your changes

Submit Feedback¶

The best way to send feedback is to file an issue at https://github.com/biglocalnews/civic-scraper/issues.

If you are proposing a feature:

Explain in detail how it would work.
Keep the scope as narrow as possible, to make it easier to implement.
Remember that this is a volunteer-driven project, and that contributions are welcome :)

Get Started!¶

Ready to contribute? Here’s how to set up civic-scraper for local development.

Fork the civic-scraper repo on GitHub.

Clone your fork locally:

$ git clone git@github.com:your_name_here/civic-scraper.git

Install developement dependencies and your local copy of the code into a virtualenv and set up your fork for local development. There are numerous ways to create virtual environments in Python. Below uses the venv library built into recent Python versions:

# Create a virtual env alongside the civic-scraper git repo
python -m venv civic-scraper-env

# Activate the virtual env
source civic-scraper-env/bin/activate

# Install dev requirements and the Python package into the venv
cd civic-scraper/
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
python setup.py develop

Create a branch for local development:
```
$ git checkout -b name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature
```
Now you can make your changes locally.
When you’re done making changes, check that your changes pass flake8 and the tests, including testing other Python versions with tox:
```
$ flake8 civic_scraper tests
$ py.test
$ tox
```
To get flake8 and tox, just pip install them into your virtualenv.

Commit your changes and push your branch to GitHub:

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Your detailed description of your changes."
$ git push origin name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature

Submit a pull request through the GitHub website.

Pull Request Guidelines¶

Before you submit a pull request, check that it meets these guidelines:

The pull request should include tests.
If the pull request adds functionality, please be sure to review the docs and include necessary updates. For example, new classes, methods and functions should be documented.
The pull request should work for Python version 3.6 or higher. Check https://travis-ci.com/github/biglocalnews/civic-scraper/pull_requests and make sure that the tests pass for all supported Python versions.