InstrumentKit Development Guide¶
Introduction¶
This guide details how InstrumentKit is laid out from a developer’s point of view, how to add instruments, communication methods and unit tests.
Getting Started¶
To get started with development for InstrumentKit, a few additional supporting
packages must be installed. The core development packages can be found in
the supporting requirements file named dev-requirements.txt
. These will
allow you to run the tests and check that all your code changes follow our
linting rules (through pylint
).
Required Development Dependencies¶
Using pip
, these requirements can be obtained automatically by using the
provided dev-requirements.txt
:
$ pip install -r dev-requirements.txt
- mock
- pytest
- pylint
Optional Development Dependencies¶
In addition to the required dev dependencies, there are optional ones.
The package tox allows you to quickly run the tests against all supported
versions of Python, assuming you have them installed. It is suggested that you
install tox
and regularly run your tests by calling the simple command:
$ tox
More details on running tests can be found in testing.
Contributing Code¶
We love getting new instruments and new functionality! When sending in pull requests, however, it helps us out a lot in maintaining InstrumentKit as a usable library if you can do a couple things for us with your submission:
- Make sure code follows PEP 8 as best as possible. This helps keep the code readable and maintainable.
- Document properties and methods, including units where appropriate.
- Contributed classes should feature complete code coverage to prevent future changes from breaking functionality. This is especially important if the lead developers do not have access to the physical hardware.
- Please use Property Factories when appropriate, to consolidate parsing logic into a small number of easily-tested functions. This will also reduce the number of tests required to be written.
We can help with any and all of these, so please ask, and thank you for helping make InstrumentKit even better.