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Development Pratices

Git flow

We follow an approach named Git flow:

  • main: Should always be working with up-to-date documentation, users will run this branch.
  • dev: Integrates new features, documentation can be lacking.
  • feature/*: Feature branch than can be merged into dev only.
  • hotfix/*: Hotfix branches that can be merged into main.
  • release/*: Not used for now.

Each version has its own tag (v2.0.0 for example) and release package on Github.

When hotfixes are merged into main, they should be ported back into dev as well.

Committing

We try to commit regularly, so it is easy to revert partial changes.

Front End Types

If you played with types and routes in the back end, remember to regenerate the front-end types, using the following command from the webapp folder while the back end is running (see how to launch here). 

cd webapp
yarn types   # while the back end is runnnig

Pre-commit Hooks

When you commit, the pre-commit hooks will automatically be run to format the code included in the commit. We have different hooks which will run mypy, reorder imports, clean unnecessary white-spacing, and perform typical formatting with black, flake8 and prettier.

  • In some cases, you might need to format using make format. However, in most cases, pre-commit hooks will make the necessary changes automatically.
  • mypy errors will never prevent a commit, but it will print the errors so that you can fix them if you introduced a new one.

How to temporarily disable pre-commits?

For a specific commit, you can avoid running the pre-commits with the flag --no-verify. If you do this, make sure to run pre-commit run --all-files before opening a PR, which will run the pre-commit on all files.

Testing

It might be that all tests don't pass at each commit, and this is normal. Tests can take a while to run, and so you might want to run them only at specific moments, such as before opening a new PR. When ready to run tests, you can do the following commmands. 

make format   # It will fix formatting issues.
make test     # It will check for formatting issues, run mypy and all unit tests.

You can also only run specific tests, using poetry run pytest {path_to_test.py}.

Clean cache for routers tests

For tests in tests/test_routers, we run the startup task once and save the result in /tmp/azimuth_test_cache. When modifying Modules, you need to clean it manually or by running make clean.

Regularly launch the app

Even when all unit tests pass, it may happen that some new issues arise when launching the app. When doing important code changes, it is crucial to launch the app and see if the behavior is as expected. Details on launching the app are available here.

Opening a Pull Request (PR)

We have a template for when you open a PR. Follow instructions and check the boxes to acknowledge that you have done the required steps. Regarding the CHANGELOG.md, you will need to add your changes only if it is visible for the end-users. This helps us when building the release notes.