Developer Guide

Whole Tale is an open-source software project. External contributions are encouraged. Please feel free to ask questions or suggest changes to the this Developer Guide.

Issue management

The core team uses Github for issue management. General issues or where the specific component is unknown are filed in <https://github.com/whole-tale/whole-tale/issues.

During weekly development calls, issues are prioritized, clarified, and assigned to release milestones.

Defining “done”

What does it mean for an issue or task to be “done”?

  • Code complete

  • Unit tests complete and passing

  • Manual tests defined and passing

  • Documentation updated

  • PR reviewed and merged

Code management

Best practices:

  • Never commit code to master. Always use a fork or feature branch and create a Pull Request for your work.

  • Name your branch for the purpose of the change. For example feat-add-foo.

  • Always include clear commit messages

  • Organize each commit to represent one logical set of changes. For example, separate out code formatting as one commit and functional changes as another.

  • Reference individual issues in commits

  • Prefer rebasing over merging from master

  • Learn to use rebase to squash commits – organize commits for ease of review.

  • Never merge your own PR if not approved by at least one person. If reviews aren’t happening in a timely matter, escalate them to the team.

  • Merging a PR means that the work has been tested, reviewed, and documented.

Testing

Every PR must include either a unit test or manual test scenario. PRs will not be be merged unless tests run successfully.

Manual test cases will be added to the test plan template.

For the Whole Tale API, we leverage Girder’s automated testing framework.

Tests are run via CircleCI. Tests will fail with < 82% coverage.

Repositories and components

The project has the following repositories:

Core services:

Setting up for local development

The entire WT platform stack can be deployed locally or on a VM using the development deployment process.

The WT platform stack can be deployed on an Open-Stack cluster using the Terraform deployment process.

Integrating with the ‘Analyze in Whole Tale’ feature

To utilize Whole Tale’s ability to create a Tale based on data on your repository, follow the steps outline below. The general idea behind this feature is that the backend endpoint for this feature will never change, but the user interface may. To get around this, third parties should send their users to the /integration endpoint, which then re-directs them to the appropriate frontend URL.

  1. Clone the girder_wholetale repository

  2. Create a folder in server/lib with the name of your service as the folder name

  3. Add an integration.py file in the folder

  4. Copy and paste the contents of the DataONE or Dataverse integration.py into yours

  5. Change the content in autoDescribeRoute to match your service, including any query parameters

  6. Change the name of the __DataImport method to match the name of your service

  7. Modify any of the query parameters in the method if you’ve changed them

  8. Navigate to server/rest/integration.py

  9. Import your method in your integration.py (see how it’s done for current integrators

  10. Add self.route(‘GET’, (‘YOUR_SERVICE_NAME’,), YOUR_METHOD_NAME) to the __init__