Contributors Guide¶
This is a community driven project and everyone is welcome to contribute.
The project is hosted at the GMT GitHub repository.
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.
Ways to Contribute¶
Ways to Contribute Documentation and/or Code¶
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.
Make a tutorial or example of how to do something.
Improve the API documentation.
Contribute code you already have. It doesn’t need to be perfect! We will help you clean things up, test it, etc.
Ways to Contribute Feedback¶
Ways to Contribute to Community Building¶
Participate and answer questions on the GMT Community Forum.
Participate in discussions at the monthly GMT Community Meetings, which are announced on the forum governance page.
Cite GMT when using the project.
Spread the word about GMT or start the project!
Providing Feedback¶
Reporting a Bug¶
Find the Issues tab on the top of the GitHub repository and click New Issue.
Click on Get started next to Bug report.
Please try to fill out the template with as much detail as you can.
After submitting your bug report, try to answer any follow up questions about the bug as best as you can.
Submitting a Feature Request¶
Find the Issues tab on the top of the GitHub repository and click New Issue.
Click on Get started next to Feature request.
Please try to fill out the template with as much detail as you can.
After submitting your feature request, try to answer any follow up questions as best as you can.
Submitting General Comments/Questions¶
There are several pages on the Community Forum where you can submit general comments and/or questions:
For questions about using GMT, select New Topic from the Q&A Page.
For general comments, select New Topic from the Lounge Page.
To share your work, select New Topic from the Showcase Page.
General Guidelines¶
Resources for New Contributors¶
Please take a look at these resources to learn about Git and pull requests (don’t hesitate to ask for help):
Getting Help¶
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.
Pull Request Workflow¶
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 Making a Pull Request (PR):¶
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.
General Process for Pull Request 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.
Contributing 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.
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¶
The source code for GMT is locating in the src/ directory. When contributing code, be sure to follow the general guidelines in the pull request workflow section.