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# Contributing and feedback guidelines

There are many ways to contribute to Pelican. You can improve the documentation, add missing features, and fix bugs (or just report them). You can also help out by reviewing and commenting on existing issues.

Don’t hesitate to fork Pelican and submit an issue or pull request on GitHub. When doing so, please adhere to the following guidelines.

## Filing issues

- Before you file an issue, try asking for help first.
- If determined to file an issue, first check for existing issues, including closed issues.

## How to get help

Before you ask for help, please make sure you do the following:

1. Read the documentation thoroughly. If in a hurry, at least use the search field that is provided at top-right on the documentation pages. Make sure you read the docs for the Pelican version you are using.
2. Use a search engine (e.g., DuckDuckGo, Google) to search for a solution to your problem. Someone may have already found a solution, perhaps in the form of a plugin or a specific combination of settings.
3. Try reproducing the issue in a clean environment, ensuring you are using:

- latest Pelican release (or an up-to-date git clone of Pelican master)
- latest releases of libraries used by Pelican
- no plugins or only those related to the issue

NOTE: The most common sources of problems are anomalies in (1) themes, (2) settings files, and (3) `make`/`fab` automation wrappers. If you can’t reproduce your problem when using the following steps to generate your site, then the problem is almost certainly with your chosen theme and/or settings file (and not Pelican itself):

    cd ~/projects/your-site
    git clone https://github.com/getpelican/pelican ~/projects/pelican
    pelican content -s ~/projects/pelican/samples/pelican.conf.py -t ~/projects/pelican/pelican/themes/notmyidea

If despite the above efforts you still cannot resolve your problem, be sure to include in your inquiry the following information, preferably in the form of links to content uploaded to a paste service, GitHub repository, or other publicly-accessible location:

- Describe what version of Pelican you are running (output of `pelican --version` or the HEAD commit hash if you cloned the repo) and how exactly you installed it (the full command you used, e.g. `pip install pelican`).
- If you are looking for a way to get some end result, prepare a detailed description of what the end result should look like (preferably in the form of an image or a mock-up page) and explain in detail what you have done so far to achieve it.
- If you are trying to solve some issue, prepare a detailed description of how to reproduce the problem. If the issue cannot be easily reproduced, it cannot be debugged by developers or volunteers. Describe only the minimum steps necessary to reproduce it (no extra plugins, etc.).
- Upload your settings file or any other custom code that would enable people to reproduce the problem or to see what you have already tried to achieve the desired end result.
- Upload detailed and complete output logs and backtraces (remember to add the `--debug` flag: `pelican --debug content [...]`)

Once the above preparation is ready, you can contact people willing to help via (preferably) the `#pelican` IRC channel or send a message to `authors at getpelican dot com`. Remember to include all the information you prepared.

### The #pelican IRC channel

- Because of differing time zones, you may not get an immediate response to your question, but please be patient and stay logged into IRC — someone will almost always respond if you wait long enough (it may take a few hours).
- If you don’t have an IRC client handy, use the webchat for quick feedback.
- You can direct your IRC client to the channel using this IRC link or you can manually join the `#pelican` IRC channel on the freenode IRC network.

## Contributing code

Before you submit a contribution, please ask whether it is desired so that you don’t spend a lot of time working on something that would be rejected for a known reason. Consider also whether your new feature might be better suited as a plugin — you can ask for help to make that determination.

### Using Git and GitHub

- Create a new git branch specific to your change (as opposed to making your commits in the master branch).
- Don’t put multiple unrelated fixes/features in the same branch / pull request. For example, if you’re hacking on a new feature and find a bugfix that doesn’t require your new feature, make a new distinct branch and pull request for the bugfix.
- Check for unnecessary whitespace via `git diff --check` before committing.
- First line of your commit message should start with present-tense verb, be 50 characters or less, and include the relevant issue number(s) if applicable. Example: `Ensure proper PLUGIN_PATH behavior. Refs #428.` If the commit completely fixes an existing bug report, please use `Fixes #585` or `Fix #585` syntax (so the relevant issue is automatically closed upon PR merge).
- After the first line of the commit message, add a blank line and then a more detailed explanation (when relevant).
- Squash your commits to eliminate merge commits and ensure a clean and readable commit history.
- If you have previously filed a GitHub issue and want to contribute code that addresses that issue, please use `hub pull-request` instead of using GitHub’s web UI to submit the pull request. This isn’t an absolute requirement, but makes the maintainers’ lives much easier! Specifically: install hub and then run hub pull-request to turn your GitHub issue into a pull request containing your code.

### Contribution quality standards

- Adhere to PEP8 coding standards whenever possible. This can be eased via the pep8 or flake8 tools, the latter of which in particular will give you some useful hints about ways in which the code/formatting can be improved.
- Make sure your code is compatible with Python 2.7, 3.3, and 3.4 — see our compatibility cheatsheet for more details.
- Add docs and tests for your changes. Undocumented and untested features will not be accepted.
- Run all the tests on all versions of Python supported by Pelican to ensure nothing was accidentally broken.

Check out our Git Tips page or ask for help if you need assistance or have any questions about these guidelines.

## Setting up the development environment

While there are many ways to set up one’s development environment, following is a method that uses virtualenv. If you don’t have `virtualenv` installed, you can install it via:

    $ pip install virtualenv

Virtual environments allow you to work on Python projects which are isolated from one another so you can use different packages (and package versions) with different projects.

To create and activate a virtual environment, use the following syntax:

    $ virtualenv ~/virtualenvs/pelican
    $ cd ~/virtualenvs/pelican
    $ . bin/activate

To clone the Pelican source:

    $ git clone https://github.com/getpelican/pelican.git src/pelican

To install the development dependencies:

    $ cd src/pelican
    $ pip install -r dev_requirements.txt

To install Pelican and its dependencies:

    $ python setup.py develop

Or using `pip`:

    $ pip install -e .

## Building the docs

If you make changes to the documentation, you should preview your changes before committing them:

    $ pip install sphinx
    $ cd src/pelican/docs
    $ make html

Open `_build/html/index.html` in your browser to preview the documentation.

## Running the test suite

Each time you add a feature, there are two things to do regarding tests: check that the existing tests pass, and add tests for the new feature or bugfix.

The tests live in `pelican/tests` and you can run them using the “discover” feature of `unittest`:

    $ python -m unittest discover

After making your changes and running the tests, you may see a test failure mentioning that “some generated files differ from the expected functional tests output.” If you have made changes that affect the HTML output generated by Pelican, and the changes to that output are expected and deemed correct given the nature of your changes, then you should update the output used by the functional tests. To do so, you can use the following two commands:

    $ LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 pelican -o pelican/tests/output/custom/ \
        -s samples/pelican.conf.py samples/content/
    $ LC_ALL=fr_FR.utf8 pelican -o pelican/tests/output/custom_locale/ \
        -s samples/pelican.conf_FR.py samples/content/
    $ LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 pelican -o pelican/tests/output/basic/ \
        samples/content/

### Testing on Python 2 and 3

Testing on Python 3 currently requires some extra steps: installing Python 3-compatible versions of dependent packages and plugins.

Tox is a useful tool to run tests on both versions. It will install the Python 3-compatible version of dependent packages.

## Python 3 development tips

Here are some tips that may be useful when doing some code for both Python 2.7 and Python 3 at the same time:

- Assume every string and literal is unicode (import unicode_literals):
  - Do not use prefix `u'`.
  - Do not encode/decode strings in the middle of sth. Follow the code to the source (or target) of a string and encode/decode at the first/last possible point.
  - In other words, write your functions to expect and to return unicode.
  - Encode/decode strings if e.g. the source is a Python function that is known to handle this badly, e.g. strftime() in Python 2.
- Use new syntax: print function, “except ... as e” (not comma) etc.
- Refactor method calls like `dict.iteritems()`, `xrange()` etc. in a way that runs without code change in both Python versions.
- Do not use magic method `__unicode()__` in new classes. Use only `__str()__` and decorate the class with `@python_2_unicode_compatible`.
- Do not start int literals with a zero. This is a syntax error in Py3k.
- Unfortunately I did not find an octal notation that is valid in both Pythons. Use decimal instead.
- use six, e.g.:
  - `isinstance(.., basestring) -> isinstance(.., six.string_types)`
  - `isinstance(.., unicode) -> isinstance(.., six.text_type)`
- `setlocale()` in Python 2 bails when we give the locale name as unicode, and since we are using `from __future__ import unicode_literals`, we do that everywhere! As a workaround, I enclosed the localename with `str()`; in Python 2 this casts the name to a byte string, in Python 3 this should do nothing, because the locale name already had been unicode.
- Kept range() almost everywhere as-is (2to3 suggests list(range())), just changed it where I felt necessary.
- Changed xrange() back to range(), so it is valid in both Python versions.

## Logging tips

Try to use logging with appropriate levels.

For logging messages that are not repeated, use the usual Python way:

    # at top of file
    import logging
    logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)

    # when needed
    logger.warning("A warning with %s formatting", arg_to_be_formatted)

Do not format log messages yourself. Use `%s` formatting in messages and pass arguments to logger. This is important, because Pelican logger will preprocess some arguments (like Exceptions) for Py2/Py3 compatibility.

### Limiting extraneous log messages

If the log message can occur several times, you may want to limit the log to prevent flooding. In order to do that, use the `extra` keyword argument for the logging message in the following format:

    logger.warning("A warning with %s formatting", arg_to_be_formatted,
        extra={'limit_msg': 'A generic message for too many warnings'})

Optionally, you can also set `'limit_args'` as a tuple of arguments in `extra` dict if your generic message needs formatting.

Limit is set to `5`, i.e, first four logs with the same `'limit_msg'` are outputted normally but the fifth one will be logged using `'limit_msg'` (and `'limit_args'` if present). After the fifth, corresponding log messages will be ignored.

For example, if you want to log missing resources, use the following code:

    for resource in resources:
        if resource.is_missing:
            logger.warning(
                'The resource %s is missing', resource.name,
                extra={'limit_msg': 'Other resources were missing'})

The log messages will be displayed as follows:

    WARNING: The resource prettiest_cat.jpg is missing
    WARNING: The resource best_cat_ever.jpg is missing
    WARNING: The resource cutest_cat.jpg is missing
    WARNING: The resource lolcat.jpg is missing
    WARNING: Other resources were missing

### Outputting traceback in the logs

If you’re logging inside an `except` block, you may want to provide the traceback information as well. You can do that by setting `exc_info` keyword argument to `True` during logging. However, doing so by default can be undesired because tracebacks are long and can be confusing to regular users. Try to limit them to `--debug` mode like the following:

    try:
        some_action()
    except Exception as e:
        logger.error('Exception occurred: %s', e,
            exc_info=settings.get('DEBUG', False))

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