Contributing¶

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

Bug reports/Feature Requests/Feedback/Questions¶

It is incredibly helpful to us when users report bugs, unexpected behaviour, or request features. You can do the following:

When doing any of these, please try to be as succinct, but detailed, as possible, and use a “Minimum Working Example” whenever applicable.

Documentation improvements¶

21cmFAST could always use more documentation, whether as part of the official 21cmFAST docs, in docstrings, or even on the web in blog posts, articles, and such. If you do the latter, take the time to let us know about it!

High-Level Steps for Development¶

This is an abbreviated guide to getting started with development of 21cmFAST, focusing on the discrete high-level steps to take. See our notes for developers for more details about how to get around the 21cmFAST codebase and other technical details.

There are two avenues for you to develop 21cmFAST. If you plan on making significant changes, and working with 21cmFAST for a long period of time, please consider becoming a member of the 21cmFAST GitHub organisation (by emailing any of the owners or admins). You may develop as a member or as a non-member.

The difference between members and non-members only applies to the first step of the development process.

Note that it is highly recommended to work in an isolated python environment with all dev requirements installed. This will ensure that pre-commit hooks will run that enforce the ruff checks. If you do not install these requirements, you must manually run ruff before committing your changes, otherwise your changes will likely fail continuous integration.

As a member:

Clone the repo:

git clone git@github.com:21cmFAST/21cmFAST.git

As a non-member:

First fork 21cmFAST (look for the “Fork” button), then clone the fork locally:
```
git clone git@github.com:your_name_here/21cmFAST.git
```

The following steps are the same for both members and non-members:

Install the code in “editable” or “development” mode (see developer installation instructions).
Create a branch for local development:
```
git checkout -b name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature
```
Now you can make your changes locally. Note: as a member, you _must_ do this step. If you make changes on main, you will _not_ be able to push them.

When you’re done making changes, run pytest to check that your changes didn’t break things. You can run a single test or subset of tests as well (see pytest docs):
```
pytest
```
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
```
Note that if the commit step fails due to a pre-commit hook, most likely the act of running the hook itself has already fixed the error. Try doing the add and commit again (up, up, enter). If it’s still complaining, manually fix the errors and do the same again.
Submit a pull request through the GitHub website.

Pull Request Guidelines¶

If you need some code review or feedback while you’re developing the code just make the pull request. You can mark the PR as a draft until you are happy for it to be merged.