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Contributing to AAQ

Thank you for your interest in contributing to AAQ!

AAQ is an open source project started by data scientists at IDinsight and sponsored by Google.org. Everyone is welcome to contribute! 🤝🏿

Note

If you want to set up the complete development environment for AAQ first, you can follow the setup instructions here. Otherwise, this page provides general guidelines on how to contribute to the project with a minimal setup.

Pull requests guide

This section shows you how to raise a pull request to the project.

Make a fork

  1. Fork the project repository by clicking on the "Fork" button.

  2. Clone the repo using:

    git clone git@github.com:<your GitHub handle>/ask-a-question.git

  3. Navigate to the project directory.

    cd ask-a-question

Install prerequisites

Install conda.

Setup your virtual Python environment

You can automatically create a ready-to-go aaq conda environment with:

make fresh-env
conda activate aaq

If you encounter errors while installing psycopg2, see here for troubleshooting.

If you would like to set up your Python environment manually, you can follow the steps here.

Make your changes

  1. Create a feature branch for your development changes:

    git checkout -b feature

  2. Run mypy with mypy core_backend/app (1)

  3. Then git add and git commit your changes:

    git add modified_files
git commit

  4. And then push the changes to your fork in GitHub

    git push -u origin feature

  5. Go to the GitHub web page of your fork of the AAQ repo. Click the Pull request button to send your changes to the project’s maintainers for review. This will send a notification to the committers.

  1. pre-commit runs in its own virtual environment. Since mypy needs all the packages installed, this would mean keeping a whole separate copy of your environment just for it. That's too bulky so the pre-commit only checks a few high-level typing things. You still need to run mypy directly to catch all the typing issues. If you forget, GitHub Actions 'Linting' workflow will pick up all the mypy errors.

Next steps

If you haven't already, see Setup on how to set up the complete development environment for AAQ. Otherwise, you can check out how to test the AAQ codebase.