Contributing

First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute!

What should I know before I get started?

This project is there to offer a Python library for interacting with ENA‘s API.

The project is developed on GitHub at https://github.com/bebatut/enasearch.

How can I contribute?

Reporting mistakes or errors

The easiest way to start contributing is to file an issue to tell us about a spelling mistake or a factual error.

Your first content contribution

Once you are feeling more comfortable, you can propose changes via Pull Request.

Indeed, to manage changes, we use GitHub flow based on Pull Requests:

  1. Create a fork of this repository on GitHub
  2. Clone your fork of this repository to create a local copy on your computer
  3. Create a new branch in your local copy for each significant change
  4. Commit the changes in that branch
  5. Push that branch to your fork on GitHub
  6. Submit a pull request from that branch to the master repository
  7. If you receive feedback, make changes in your local clone and push them to your branch on GitHub: the pull request will update automatically

For beginners, the GitHub interface will help you in the process of editing a file. It will automatically create a fork of this repository where you can safely work and then submit the changes as a pull request without having to touch the command line.

Tests

The code of ENASearch is covered by tests. They are run automatically on Travis. You can activate Travis on your fork to run also the tests automatically.

We also recommend to run them locally before pushing to GitHub with:

$ make test

Documentation

Documentation about ENASearch is available online at http://bebatut.fr/enasearch

To update it:

  1. Make the changes in src/docs
  2. Generate the doc with
$ make doc
  1. Check it by opening the docs/index.html file in a web browser
  2. Propose the changes via a Pull Request

Update the data

The fields and their description, the formats, etc were extracted manually and stored in CSV files in enasearch_data. They were then serialized to be quickly imported in enasearch script.

To update them:

  1. Extract the information from tables on ENA website

    For example for the display_options has been extracted from “Display options” on “REST URLs for data retrieval” page

  2. Format the table into a CSV file

  3. Update the corresponding file in enasearch_data directory

  4. Serialize the data with

    $ make data

  5. Commit the changes