Contributing

October 17, 2025 · View on GitHub

First off, thank you for considering contributing to Apache OpenDAL! Your help is greatly appreciated. This guide will provide you with all the information you need to get started.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, please ensure you have the following tools installed:

Git: For version control. Setup instructions here.
uv: To manage the python dependencies and environment. See Installation instructions here.
cargo: To manage the rust dependencies and environment. See Installation instructions here.
taplo: Simple checker and formatter for TOML files. See Installation instructions here.
hawkeye: Simple license header checker and formatter. See Installation instructions here.
Just: A command runner used to simplify our development workflow. See Installation instructions here.

Getting Started: Setup

All development commands are managed through a justfile. Setting up your environment is as simple as running one command.

Clone the repository:

git clone git@github.com:apache/opendal.git
cd opendal/bindings/python

Set up the virtual environment and install dependencies:
```
just setup
```
This command will create a Python virtual environment in the .venv directory and install all necessary development and runtime dependencies using uv.

Development Workflow

The justfile provides recipes for common development tasks. You can see all available commands by running just --list.

Building the Project

You can build a development or release version of the library.

Install for development: This builds the package and installs it in the current virtual environment, allowing you to immediately use it for testing.
```
just install-dev
```
Build a distributable wheel: If you need to create a wheel file for distribution.
```
# Build a development wheel
just build-dev

# Build an optimized release wheel
just build-release
```
The built wheel will be located in the dist/ directory.

Running Tests

We use pytest for testing. The test recipe runs all tests within the virtual environment.

# Run all tests
just test

# Pass arguments directly to pytest
# For example, run tests for the 'fs' operator matching 'test_write'
OPENDAL_TEST=fs OPENDAL_FS_ROOT=/tmp just test -vk test_write

Code Quality: Formatting & Linting

We use ruff for Python linting/formatting and cargo fmt/clippy for Rust. just makes it easy to ensure your code meets our quality standards.

Format all code:
```
just fmt
```
Check for linting errors:
```
just lint
```
Automatically fix what can be fixed:
```
just fix
```

Important! Before committing your changes, please run the pre-commit checks to ensure everything is formatted and linted correctly.
just pre-commit

Building Documentation

The API documentation is built using mkdocs. This is automatically handled when you build the project.

# Building the project also builds the docs
just build-dev

Cleaning the Workspace

If you need to start fresh, the clean command will remove all build artifacts, caches, and the virtual environment.

just clean

This command removes the .venv, build artifacts, and Python cache files.

Thank you again for your contribution!