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Contributing to dbterd

dbterd is open source software. It is what it is today because community members have opened issues, provided feedback, and contributed to the knowledge loop. Whether you are a seasoned open source contributor or a first-time committer, we welcome and encourage you to contribute code, documentation, ideas, or problem statements to this project.

About this document

There are many ways to contribute to the ongoing development of dbterd, such as by participating in discussions and issues.

The rest of this document serves as a more granular guide for contributing code changes to dbterd (this repository). It is not intended as a guide for using dbterd, and some pieces assume a level of familiarity with Python development with poetry. Specific code snippets in this guide assume you are using macOS or Linux and are comfortable with the command line.

  • Branches: All pull requests from community contributors should target the main branch (default). If the change is needed as a patch for a minor version of dbt that has already been released (or is already a release candidate), a maintainer will backport the changes in your PR to the relevant "latest" release branch (1.0.<latest>, 1.1.<latest>, ...). If an issue fix applies to a release branch, that fix should be first committed to the development branch and then to the release branch (rarely release-branch fixes may not apply to main).
  • Releases: Before releasing a new minor version, we prepare a series of beta release candidates to allow users to test the new version in live environments. This is an important quality assurance step, as it exposes the new code to a wide variety of complicated deployments and can surface bugs before official release. Releases are accessible via pip.

Getting the code

Installing git

You will need git in order to download and modify the dbterd source code. On macOS, the best way to download git is to just install Xcode.

External contributors

You can contribute to dbterd by forking the dbterd repository. For a detailed overview on forking, check out the GitHub docs on forking. In short, you will need to:

  1. Fork the dbterd repository
  2. Clone your fork locally
  3. Check out a new branch for your proposed changes
  4. Push changes to your fork
  5. Open a pull request against datnguye/dbterd from your forked repository

Setting up an environment

There are some tools that will be helpful to you in developing locally. While this is the list relevant for dbterd development, many of these tools are used commonly across open-source python projects.

Tools

We will buy poetry in dbterd development and testing.

So first install poetry via the official installer

curl -sSL https://install.python-poetry.org | python3 -

or via pip:

python3 -m pip install poetry --upgrade

then, start installing the local environment:

python3 -m poetry install
python3 -m poetry shell
poe git-hooks
pip install -e .
dbterd -h

Testing

Once you're able to manually test that your code change is working as expected, it's important to run existing automated tests, as well as adding some new ones. These tests will ensure that:

  • Your code changes do not unexpectedly break other established functionality
  • Your code changes can handle all known edge cases
  • The functionality you're adding will keep working in the future

Use pytest

Finally, you can also run a specific test or group of tests using pytest directly. With a virtualenv active and dev dependencies installed you can do things like:

poe test

Run test with coverage report:

poe test-cov

See pytest usage docs for an overview of useful command-line options.

Submitting a Pull Request

Code can be merged into the current development branch main by opening a pull request. A dbterd maintainer will review your PR. They may suggest code revision for style or clarity, or request that you add unit or integration test(s). These are good things! We believe that, with a little bit of help, anyone can contribute high-quality code.

Automated tests run via GitHub Actions. If you're a first-time contributor, all tests (including code checks and unit tests) will require a maintainer to approve. Changes in the dbterd repository trigger unit tests against multiple Python versions with the latest dbterd code changes.

Once all tests are passing and your PR has been approved, a dbterd maintainer will merge your changes into the active development branch. And that's it! Happy developing 🎉