Contributing

A list of issues and ongoing work is available on the PySTAC issues page. If you want to contribute code, the best way is to coordinate with the core developers via an issue or pull request conversation.

Development installation

Fork PySTAC into your GitHub account. Then, clone the repo and install it locally with pip as follows:

$ git clone git@github.com:your_user_name/pystac.git
$ cd  pystac
$ pip install -e .

Testing

PySTAC runs tests using unittest. You can find unit tests in the tests/ directory.

Run a single test with:

python -m unittest tests/test_catalog.py

or an entire folder using:

python -m unittest discover -v -s tests/

or the entire project using:

./scripts/test

More details on using unittest are here.

Code quality checks

PySTAC uses flake8 and yapf for code formatting and style checks.

To run the flake8 style checks:

> flake8 pystac
> flake8 tests

To format code:

> yapf -ipr pystac
> yapf -ipr tests

You can also run the ./scripts/test script to check flake8 and yapf.

CHANGELOG

PySTAC maintains a changelog to track changes between releases. All PRs should make a changelog entry unless the change is trivial (e.g. fixing typos) or is entirely invisible to users who may be upgrading versions (e.g. an improvement to the CI system).

For changelog entries, please link to the PR of that change. This needs to happen in a few steps:

• Make a PR to PySTAC with your changes
• Record the link to the PR
• Push an additional commit to your branch with the changelog entry with the link to the PR.

For more information on changelogs and how to write a good entry, see keep a changelog