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Developing Porcupine

If you want to do something to Porcupine, that's awesome! I have tried to make contributing easy:

  • Some issues are labeled as "good first issue".
  • If you don't understand what I meant in an issue, please ask me to clarify it. I have written most issues so that I understand what I wrote, and if you are new to Porcupine, you likely need a longer explanation to understand what the problem is.
  • Don't worry about asking too many questions! It's not annoying. I like interacting with other programmers.
  • There is not much boilerplate involved in the contributing process. You just create a pull request and that's it. You can choose an issue and start working on it, without prior permission. Instead of working on an issue, you can also create something that you would like to have in an editor.
  • You don't need to read anything before you can get started. I recommend having a look at the dev-doc folder, especially dev-doc/architecture-and-design.md, but that's not required.
  • Don't worry too much about whether your code is good or not. I will review the pull requests and try to help you out. There are also checks running on GitHub Actions.
  • Don't worry too much about whether your PR follows whatever best practices you might have heard of. Just make a PR and I will edit it as needed.

To get started, make a fork of Porcupine with the button in the top right corner of this page. Then install Python 3.9 or newer and git, and run these commands:

git clone https://github.com/YourUserName/porcupine
cd porcupine
python3 -m venv env
source env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
python3 -m porcupine

This should run Porcupine. If you change some of Porcupine's code in the porcupine directory and you run python3 -m porcupine again, your changes should be visible right away.

Windows-specific notes:

  • You need to use py instead of python3 when creating the venv, and env\Scripts\activate instead of source env/bin/activate to activate it.
  • If creating the venv fails with an error message like Error: [Errno 13] Permission denied: ...\\python.exe, try creating the venv into a different folder. It is created into whatever folder you are currently cd'd to (i.e. the folder that shows up on the command prompt before the >).

Porcupine uses mypy, which is a tool that type-checks the code without running it. For small pull requests, you probably don't need to run it on your computer as GitHub Actions runs it on your pull request anyway. You can run it locally like this:

mypy porcupine

It often points out problems like forgetting to check whether something is None. If you forget to run mypy, it doesn't matter, because GitHub Actions will run it before I merge your PR.

Porcupine also uses a few tools (pycln, black, isort) to format code. They run automatically when you make a pull request. If you cannot push after the automatic formatting, try running git pull before pushing or use git push --force.

After doing some development and closing the terminal that you set up the environment in, you can go back to the environment by cd'ing to the correct place and running source env/bin/activate again. You can run deactivate to undo the source env/bin/activate.

Porcupine also has tests, but many changes to Porcupine don't need tests. See dev-doc/tests.md for details about how and when Porcupine uses tests.

Where to talk to us

GitHub issues and pull request comments are the best way to contact other Porcupine developers.

Many Porcupine developers are also sometimes (very inconsistently, usually about 7PM-11PM UTC) on the ##learnpython channel of the libera IRC server. Compared to GitHub issues, IRC feels more like a casual conversation, and we often discuss things that have nothing to do with Porcupine. To join ##learnpython, you can e.g. go to https://kiwiirc.com/nextclient/irc.libera.chat/##learnpython or run Akuli's mantaray program.