Contributing#

Getting Access to the DESY GitLab#

While Pull Requests can be opened in the GitHub repository (https://github.com/constellation-daq/Constellation), the Constellation repository on DESY’s GitLab instance (https://gitlab.desy.de/constellation/constellation) is used as the primary issue tracker. A DESY account is not necessary for this, on the login page one can select Helmholtz ID using either a research institute or GitHub account. Note that forking or creating projects is not possible for external users.

Setting up the Development Environment#

It is highly recommended to create a virtual Python environment for development.

Pre-commit Hooks#

When contributing to the development of Constellation, following the coding style can be ensured by setting up and activating git pre-commit hooks which check the code against a variety of code validation tools automatically when you commit your code.

Constellation uses the pre-commit tool which registers, updates and runs these hooks automatically. It can be installed and activated via

pip install pre-commit
pre-commit install --install-hooks

Development Dependencies#

Meson downloads the required dependencies automatically if they are not found on the system. System-wide installations of the dependencies can reduce the compilation time significantly.

  • ccache + how to setup CXX

  • meson dependencies, see docker images

pip install --no-build-isolation -e ".[dev,test]"

Running the Test Suite#

Constellation implements an extensive C++ test suite using Catch2 which needs to be explicitly enabled at compile time via:

meson configure build -Dcxx_tests=enabled

The unit tests can then be executed via:

meson test -C build

Constellation implements an extensive test suite using pytest which can be executed by running:

pytest

Running Coverage Checks#

Requires gcvor and compilation with GCC.

pip install gcovr

To create a coverage report, run:

meson setup build_cov -Dcxx_tests=enabled -Db_coverage=true
meson test -C build_cov
ninja -C build_cov coverage-html

pip install --no-build-isolation -e .[test]
pytest --force-sugar --cov --cov-report term --cov-report html

Building the Documentation#

To install the documentation dependencies, run:

pip install --no-build-isolation -e ".[docs]"

For generating the code documentation and user manual, also Make, doxygen and plantuml are required.

Run once or whenever you change C++ source code documentation:

make -C docs doxygen

To build the website, run:

make -C docs html

You can find the homepage of the website in docs/build/html/index.html, which you can open via:

open docs/build/html/index.html

If you encounter issue, try running:

make -C docs clean