Contributions are welcome, and they are greatly appreciated! Every little bit helps, and credit will always be given.
Report bugs at https://github.com/copier-org/copier/issues.
If you are reporting a bug, please include:
- Your operating system name and version.
- Any details about your local setup that might be helpful in troubleshooting.
- Detailed steps to reproduce the bug.
Look through the GitHub issues for bugs. Anything tagged with "bug" is open to whoever wants to implement it.
Look through the GitHub issues for features. Anything tagged with "Feature request" is open to whoever wants to implement it.
The project could always use more documentation, whether as part of the official project docs, or even on the web in blog posts, articles, and such.
The best way to send feedback is to file an issue at https://github.com/copier-org/copier/issues.
If you are proposing a feature:
- Explain in detail how it would work.
- Keep the scope as narrow as possible, to make it easier to implement.
- Remember that this is a volunteer-driven project, and that contributions are welcome. :)
Feel free to discuss with our community through our discussions channel. Be polite!
The recommended way is:
- Click on
- Wait until the terminal that pops up is ready.
- Accept the direnv and nix pop-ups that appear.
For local or more complex setups, continue reading.
We use some tools as part of our development workflow which you'll need to install into your host environment:
- Nix to provide a reproducible development environment.
- Direnv to load that environment automatically in your shell.
For some reasons you might want to avoid installing Nix in your system. Maybe you don't have enough permissions, you work on Windows, or you just don't want to add yet another package manager to your system. We believe Nix is awesome enough so as to be the default tool for almost any developer, but we respect your choice.
You can use standard Python tooling such as Poetry and a valid Python installation installed in an imperative manner of your choice.
However, you won't be able to auto-lint or auto-format code without Nix. If you don't
have Nix installed but you have Docker or Podman, you can run poe lint
and get similar
results. It will use a container to install Nix, and Nix to install the formatters.
If you still don't have Docker or Podman, don't worry. You can push your changes without formatting. As long as you give Copier maintainers permissions to change your PR, a bot will kindly auto-format code for you and push it back to your branch.
Ready to contribute? Here's how to set up the project for local development.
-
Fork the Copier repo on GitHub.
-
Clone your fork locally:
git clone git@github.com:my-user/copier.git cd copier
-
Use Direnv to set up a development environment:
# Let direnv do its magic direnv allow
Direnv will take some time to load for the 1st time. It will download all development dependencies, including Poetry, and it will use it to create a virtualenv and install Copier with all its development dependencies too.
-
Create a branch for local development:
git checkout -b name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature
Now you can make your changes locally.
-
When you're done making changes, check that your changes pass all tests:
poe test poe lint
-
Optionally, use pyclean to remove Python bytecode and build artifacts, e.g.
pipx run pyclean . --debris --verbose
-
Commit your changes and push your branch to GitHub:
git add . cz commit # use `git commit` if you prefer, but this helps git push origin name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature
-
Submit a pull request through the GitHub website.
Before you submit a pull request, check that it meets these guidelines:
- The pull request has code, it should include tests.
- Check that all checks pass on GitHub CI.
- If something significant changed, modify docs.
Follow Conventional Commits standard.
We use Commitizen to handle Copier
releases. This tool generates the appropriate tag based on that standard. It also writes
our changelog. Changes that are included there are of type fix
, feat
and refactor
; also BREAKING CHANGE:
trailers will appear. If your change is not
meaningful in the changelog, then please don't use one of those categories.
If you're a maintainer and you want to merge a PR that will produce a confusing changelog, then please squash the PR on merge, and change the commit message to make it meaningful. Remember to respect co-autorship when squashing, especially if multiple authors were involved.
If the last commit is pushed back by github-actions[bot]
and named
style: autoformat with pre-commit
, it's most likely an automatic reformatting commit
done by the CI.
Those kind of commits cannot trigger other workflows.
Thus, to be able to re-run CI, close and reopen the PR. Consider squashing on merge if
possible and practical.
To run a subset of tests:
poe test tests/the-tests-file.py
Our direnv configuration is configured to use binary caches by default.
However, to add our binary caches permanently:
nix-shell -p cachix --run 'cachix use copier && cachix use devenv'
If you use Nix Flakes, add --accept-flake-config
to install our binary cache
automatically.