Contribution Guide

This project is open source and community driven. As such we encourage code contributions of all kinds. Some areas you can contribute in:

Improve the stubs
Sync stubs with the latest version of Django
Improve plugin code and extend its capabilities
Write tests
Update dependencies
Fix and remove things from our scripts/stubtest/allowlist_todo.txt

Tutorials

If you want to start working on this project, you will need to get familiar with python typings. The Mypy documentation offers an excellent resource for this, as well as the python official documentation:

Mypy typing documentation
Python official typing documentation
Typing in Python article

Additionally, the following resources might be useful:

How to write custom mypy plugins
Typechecking Django and DRF guide
Testing mypy stubs, plugins, and types guide
Awesome Python Typing list

Dev setup

Repository Setup

As a first step you will need to fork this repository and clone your fork locally. In order to be able to continuously sync your fork with the origin repository's master branch, you will need to set up an upstream master. To do so follow this official github guide.

Dependency Setup

We use uv to manage our dev dependencies. To install it, see their installation guide

Once it's done, simply run the following command to automatically setup a virtual environment and install dev dependencies:

uv sync
source .venv/bin/activate

Finally, install the pre-commit hooks:

pre-commit install

Testing and Linting

We use mypy, pytest, ruff, and black for quality control. ruff and black are executed using pre-commit when you make a commit. To ensure there are not formatting or typing issues in the entire repository you can run:

pre-commit run --all-files

NOTE: This command will not only lint but also modify files - so make sure to commit whatever changes you've made before hand. You can also run pre-commit per file or for a specific path, simply replace "--all-files" with a target (see this guide for more info).

To execute the unit tests, simply run:

pytest -n auto

If you get some unexpected results or want to be sure that tests run is not affected by previous one, remove mypy cache:

rm -r .mypy_cache

Testing stubs with `stubtest`

Run ./scripts/stubtest.sh to test that stubs and sources are in-line.

We have some special files to allow errors:

scripts/stubtest/allowlist.txt where we store things that we really don't care about: hacks, django internal utility modules, things that are handled by our plugin, things that are not representable by type system, etc
scripts/stubtest/allowlist_todo.txt where we store all errors there are right now. Basically, this is a TODO list: we need to work through this list and fix things (or move entries to real allowlist.txt). In the end, ideally we can remove this file.
scripts/stubtest/allowlist_todo_django51.txt where we store new errors from the Django 5.0 to 5.1 upgrade. This is an extra TODO list.

You might also want to disable incremental mode while working on stubtest changes. This mode leads to several known problems (stubs do not show up or have strange errors).

Important: right now we only run stubtest on Python 3.12 (because it is the latest released version at the moment), any other versions might generate different outputs. Any work to create per-version allowlists is welcome.

Submission Guidelines

The workflow for contributions is fairly simple:

Fork and set up the repository as in the previous step.
Create a local branch.
Make whatever changes you want to contribute.
Ensure your contribution passes linting and tests.
Make a pull request with an adequate description.

Generics

As Django uses a lot of the more dynamic features of Python (i.e. metaobjects), statically typing it requires heavy use of generics. Unfortunately, the syntax for generics is also valid Python syntax. For instance, the statement class SomeClass(SuperType[int]) implicitly translates to class SomeClass(SuperType.__class_getitem__(int)). If SuperType doesn't define the __class_getitem__ method, this causes a runtime error, even if the code passes type checking.

When adding a new generic class, or changing an existing class to use generics, run a quick test to see if it causes a runtime error. If it does, please add the new generic class to the _need_generic list in the django_stubs_ext.patch module.

Private attributes

We only add hints for private attributes when it has some demonstrated real-world use case. That means from a third-party package or some well described snippet for a project. This rule helps us avoid tying in too closely to Django’s undocumented internals.

Releasing `django-stubs`

Open a pull request that updates setup.py, ext/setup.py and README.md (anyone can open this PR, not just maintainers):
- Version number major.minor.patch is formed as follows:
  
  major.minor version must match newest supported Django release.
  
  patch is sequentially increasing for each stubs release. Reset to 0 if major.minor was updated.
- Update the version= value within setup(...) call in both setup.py files. The versions must be in sync.
- Update django-stubs-ext>= dependency in root setup.py to the same version number.
- Add a new row at the top of 'Version compatibility' table in README.md.
- Use pull request title "Version x.y.z release" by convention.
- Add the correct classifiers to setup.py if support is added for a new Python or Django version
Ensure the CI succeeds. A maintainer must merge this PR. If it's just a version bump, no need to wait for a second maintainer's approval.
A maintainer must сreate a new GitHub release:
- Under "Choose a tag" enter the new version number. Do not use v prefix.
- Click "Generate release notes".
- Look for merged PRs with the 'release notes reminder' label and move them to a separate section at the top, so that they stand out. Remove the label from PRs.
- Delete all release notes lines containing by @pre-commit-ci or by @dependabot, as these are irrelevant for our users.
Once you feel brave enough, click "Publish release".
Check that the release workflow succeeds.

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