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Contributing Guidelines

First of all, thank you for considering contributing to the project.

This is a community-driven project, so it's people like you that make it useful and successful. These are some of the many ways to contribute:

  • 🐛 Submitting bug reports and feature requests
  • 📝 Writing tutorials or examples
  • 🔍 Fixing typos and improving to the documentation
  • 💡 Writing code for everyone to use

If you get stuck at any point you can create an issue on GitHub or contact us at one of the other channels mentioned below.

For more information on contributing to open source projects, GitHub's own guide is a great starting point if you are new to version control.

Ground Rules

The goal is to maintain a diverse community that's pleasant for everyone. Please be considerate and respectful of others. Everyone must abide by our Code of Conduct and we encourage all to read it carefully.

Contents

What Can I Do?

  • Tackle any issue that you wish! Please leave a comment on the issue indicating that you want to work on it. Some issues are labeled as "good first issues" to indicate that they are beginner friendly, meaning that they don't require extensive knowledge of the project.
  • Report a bug through Github issues.
  • Make a tutorial or example of how to do something.
  • Provide feedback about how we can improve the project or about your particular use case.
  • Contribute code you already have. It doesn't need to be perfect! We will help you clean things up, test it, etc.
  • Help answer questions on the GMT Community Forum.

How Can I Talk to You?

Discussion often happens in the issues and pull requests. For general questions, you can post on the GMT Community Forum. We also host community meetings roughly monthly to discuss GMT development, which are announced on the GMT Community Forum.

Reporting a Bug

Find the issues tab on the top of the Github repository and click New Issue. You'll be prompted to choose between different types of issue, like bug reports and feature requests. Choose the one that best matches your need. The issue will be populated with one of our templates. Please try to fill out the template with as much detail as you can. Remember, the more information we have, the easier it will be for us to solve your problem.

Editing the Documentation

If you're browsing the documentation and notice a typo or something that could be improved, please consider letting us know. You can either create an issue on GitHub, or click the "Edit on GitHub" button at the top right corner of the documentation, and submit a pull request (even better 🌟).

The GMT documentation is written in the plaintext markup language reStructuredText (reST) and built by documentation generator Sphinx. The reST plaintext files for the GMT documentation are located in the doc/rst/source folder. You may need to know some basic reST syntax before making changes. Please refer to our reStructuredText Cheatsheet for details.

Usually you don't need to build the documentation locally for small changes. If you want, you can install Sphinx locally, then follow the instructions for building GMT and building the documentation.

Contributing Code

Is this your first contribution? Please take a look at these resources to learn about git and pull requests (don't hesitate to ask questions):

General guidelines

We follow the git pull request workflow to make changes to our codebase. Every change made goes through a pull request, even our own, so that our continuous integration services have a change to check that the code is up to standards and passes all our tests. This way, the master branch is always stable.

General guidelines for pull requests (PRs):

  • Open an issue first describing what you want to do. If there is already an issue that matches your PR, leave a comment there instead to let us know what you plan to do.
  • Each pull request should consist of a small and logical collection of changes.
  • Larger changes should be broken down into smaller components and integrated separately.
  • Bug fixes should be submitted in separate PRs.
  • Describe what your PR changes and why this is a good thing. Be as specific as you can. The PR description is how we keep track of the changes made to the project over time.
  • Do not commit changes to files that are irrelevant to your feature or bugfix (eg: .gitignore, IDE project files, etc).
  • Write descriptive commit messages. Chris Beams has written a guide on how to write good commit messages.
  • Be willing to accept criticism and work on improving your code; we don't want to break other users' code, so care must be taken to not introduce bugs.
  • Be aware that the pull request review process is not immediate, and is generally proportional to the size of the pull request.

Code Review

After you've submitted a pull request, you should expect to hear at least a comment within a couple of days. We may suggest some changes or improvements or alternatives.

Some things that will increase the chance that your pull request is accepted quickly:

  • Write a good and detailed description of what the PR does.
  • Write tests for the code you wrote/modified.
  • Readable code is better than clever code (even with comments).
  • Write documentation for your code and leave comments explaining the reason behind non-obvious things.
  • Include an example of new features in the gallery or tutorials.

Pull requests will automatically have tests run by GitHub Actions. Github will show the status of these checks on the pull request. Try to get them all passing (green). If you have any trouble, leave a comment in the PR or get in touch.