Contributing

In general, we welcome contributions from the community, including bug fixes and documentation improvements. Please see the Issues tab for discussion.

Development environment

To get started, clone the repository and set up your local environment:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/pynapple-org/pynapple.git
cd pynapple

# Create a new conda environment
conda create --name pynapple pip python=3.8
conda activate pynapple

# Install in editable mode with dev dependencies
pip install -e ".[dev,docs]"

Note: If you're an external contributor, you'll likely want to fork the repository first with your own GitHub account, and then set up an upstream remote branch:

# Replace username with your GitHub username
git clone https://github.com/<username>/pynapple.git
git remote add upstream https://github.com/pynapple-org/pynapple

AI coding assistants

If you contribute with Claude Code, we maintain a skill that teaches it the conventions used throughout this codebase, which helps keep contributions consistent with the rest of the library:

/plugin marketplace add pynapple-org/claude-skills
/plugin install using-pynapple@pynapple-skills
/reload-plugins

If a pull request changes a public API signature, please also open an issue on pynapple-org/claude-skills so the skill can be kept in sync.

Git workflow

In general, we recommend developing changes on feature branches, and then opening a pull request against the dev branch for review.

# Create a new branch
git checkout dev
git pull origin dev # or git pull upstream dev
git checkout -b your-branch-name

# Commit and push changes
git commit -m "Your commit message"
git push origin your-branch-name

Testing and linting

You can run the tests and code linters locally using tox. This is generally kept in sync with the Github Actions defined in .github/workflows via the tox.ini file.

# Install tox
pip install tox tox-conda

# Run tests and linter
tox

Generating docs

The user documentation is generated using Sphinx and can be built using the Makefile in the doc/ folder:

cd doc && make html

You can also start a development server that will watch for changes with sphinx-autobuild:

sphinx-autobuild . _build/html