Contributing#
The contributor documentation contains instructions for how to contribute to astropy or
affiliated packages. This includes setting up a development environment, installing and
testing the development version, as well as coding, documentation, and testing
guidelines.
For newcomers the process may initially seem overwhelming, but with a little patience and practice you will see that it is not so complex. The key is to follow the steps outlined here and ask for help if you get stuck. The Astropy community is welcoming and friendly and will help you!
This is divided into two sections, first a quickstart guide that provides an introduction to the development workflow, followed by a number of detailed guides that cover provide a deeper dive and a reference for both developers and maintainers.
Important
There are useful ways to contribute to Astropy without diving into the developer workflow which is described here. For an an overview see the Contribute to Astropy page.
Contributing quickstart#
This section provides a contributing quickstart guide for Astropy. With minor changes the process will apply to contributing updates to coordinated and many affiliated packages.
Now that you have created your development environment and gotten familiar with the process, you should now read through the detailed tutorial below to see a real-life example of a simple bug fix. This includes more explanation of the steps and good advice for making a code change.
Congratulations, now you are ready to be an Astropy contributor! If you are not sure where to contribute, take a look at the Good First Issues list. These issues are the most accessible ones if you are not familiar with the Astropy source code.
Details#
Note
Parts of this guide were adapted from the pandas developer documentation. Astropy is grateful to the pandas team for their documentation efforts.