Contributing to StarFit

Contributions to the StarFit code are welcome. The main branch is protected and cannot be committed to directly. Instead, please create a Pull Request with your proposed contributions. To make a new branch and set to track origin

git checkout -b <new_branch>
git push --set-upstream origin <new_branch>

  1. If you changed the Fortran code and want to test locally, remember to re-compile or install as editable packages:

# "-e" creates an editable install, "[testing]" installs additional dependencies for testing
pip install -e ".[testing]" --no-build-isolation

To make this step more convenient we provide a Makefile in the root directory that does all three steps:

make

If there are issues with the fitness sub-module, there is a Makefile in its source directory that can be used to compile a test program outside of the python package build process.

Two automated checks (on Github Actions) must be passed (Items 2 and 3):

  1. Code formatting using pre-commit. To ensure your changes are compliant with this project’s linters, we recommend installing pre-commit prior to making any commits locally.

pip install pre-commit
pre-commit install

If you have already made non-compliant commits prior to installing pre-commit, then the pre-commit check on GitHub will fail. To make the code compliant again, run

pre-commit run --all

  1. Code tests using pytest. New tests can be added to the tests/ directory.

Run these tests as a check

python -m pytest

and include any necessary changes in the commit.

Development branch

Development branches are generated and uploaded to Test PyPI if the version number ends in .dev* where * can be blank or a optional number. For example, ‘0.3.11.dev22. They may also be flagged as pre-releases.

To install packages from Test PyPI use

pip install --index-url https://test.pypi.org/simple/ --extra-index-url https://pypi.org/simple/ starfit

You may include the -pre flag or specify a specific version.

Adding new database files

Database files specified in the .hashlist files in src/starfit/data/db,ref,stars are downloaded from the web server. To add new data files:

  1. Add the new files to the web server hosting the data files at /var/www/html/data

  2. Generate the hash using shasum -a 256 (or sha256sum)

  3. Add an entry into the hash list

When adding new databases into data/db, add corresponding labels into the file data/db/labels and a description of the data base into the file data/db/databases on the web server.

Creating database files

New database files can be made using the StarDB class in autils/stardb.py. A demonstration may be found at src/starfit/example/lc12_stardb.py. This file serves as a demonstration only and will not work as is.

Publishing to PyPI

Github releases will automatically be published to pypi.org/project/starfit/