The bottom line. Follow your Nose, or our Nose. Write-run-love tests ✊.

##Setup

###Fork, Clone, Setup Your Version of the Plotly Python API

First, you'll need to get our project. This is the appropriate clone command (if you're unfamiliar with this process, https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo):

DO THIS (in the directory where you want the repo to live)

git clone https://github.com/plotly/python-api.git

###Submodules

Second, this project uses git submodules! There both helpful and, at times, difficult to work with. The good news is you probably don't need to think about them! Just run the following shell command to make sure that your local repo is wired properly:

DO THIS (run this command in your new plotly-api directory)

make setup_subs

That's going to initialize the submodules we use in this project, update them so that they're synced to the proper commit, and copy files to the appropriate locations in your local repo.

Here's what you need to know: changes to any files inside the following directories will get overwritten. These are synced with the submodules, if you need to change functionality there, you will need to make a pull request in the appropriate sub project repository.

chunked_requests
graph_reference
mplexporter

Additionally, there are some project shortcuts that live in the makefile file. You can read all about this in the make_instructions.txt file. OR, just run:

make readme

###Making a Development Branch

Third, don't work in the master branch. As soon as you get your master branch ready, run:

DO THIS (but change the branch name)

git checkout -b my-dev-branch

... where you should give your branch a more descriptive name than my-dev-branch

###Pull Request When Ready

Once you've made your changes (and hopefully written some tests...), make that pull request!

##Suggestions

###Local Python Setting up Python versions that don't require you to use sudo is a good idea. In addition, the core Python on your machine may not be the Python that we've developed in! Here are some nice guides for Mac, Windows, and Linux:

http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/starting/install/osx/
http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/starting/install/win/
http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/starting/install/linux/

###Virtualenv Virtualenv is a way to create Python environments on your machine that know nothing about one another. This is really helpful for ironing out dependency-problems arising from different versions of packages. Here's a nice guide on how to do this: http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/dev/virtualenvs/

###Alter Your PYTHONPATH The PYTHONPATH variable in your shell tells Python where to look for modules. Since you'll be developing, it'll be a pain to need to install Python every time you need to test some functionality (or at least ensure you're running code from the right directory...). You can easily make this change from a shell:

export PYTHONPATH="/path/to/local/repo:$PYTHONPATH"

Note, that's non-permanent. When you close the shell, that variable definition disappears. Also, path/to/local/repo is your specific repository path (e.g., /Users/andrew/projects/python-api).

###Why?

Now you can run the following code and be guaranteed to have a working development version that you can make changes to on-the-fly, test, and be confident will not break on other's machines!

pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -r optional-requirements.txt
export PYTHONPATH="/path/to/local/repo:$PYTHONPATH"

##Dependencies

There's a short list of core dependencies you'll need installed in your Python environment to have any sort of fun with Plotly's Python API (see requirements.txt). Additionally, you're likely to have even more fun if you install some other requirements (see optional-requirements.txt).

###Dependencies and Virtualenv

If you decided to follow the suggestion about about the Virtualenv and you've run source bin/activate within your new virtualenv directory to activate it--you can run the following to install the core dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

To install the optional dependencies:

pip install -r optional-requirements.txt

##Testing

Our API uses Nose to run tests. (https://nose.readthedocs.org/en/latest/)

###Running Tests

Since our tests cover all the functionality, to prevent tons of errors from showing up and having to parse through a messy output, you'll need to install optional-requirements.txt as explained above.

After you've done that, go ahead and follow (y)our Nose!

nosetests -w plotly/tests

Or for more verbose output:

nosetests -w plotly/tests -v

Either of those will run every test we've written for the Python API. You can get more granular by running something like:

nosetests -w plotly/tests/test_core/test_plotly

... or even more granular by running something like:

nosetests plotly/tests/test_core/test_plotly/test_plot.py

###Writing Tests

You're strongly encouraged to write tests that check your added functionality.

When you write a new test anywhere under the tests directory, if your PR gets accepted, that test will run in a virtual machine to ensure that future changes don't break your contributions!

<3 Team Plotly

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