Setting up RocketPy as a Developer

Your first step to contribute to RocketPy is to set up your development environment. If you are an experienced developer, you may skip to the final sections of this page.

Forking the repository

First you need to fork the RocketPy repository. You can do this by clicking the Fork button on the top right corner of the repository page on GitHub.

By default, the fork will only have the master branch. You should also fork the develop branch. You can do this by disabling the “Copy the master branch only” option when forking.

Important

Our master branch is the stable branch, and the develop branch is the development branch. You should always create your PRs against the develop branch, unless it is a really important hotfix.

Alternatively, one may clone the repository directly from the RocketPy repository and then add the fork as a remote. However, this option is less frequently used.

Cloning the Repository

Next step is to clone the repository to your local machine. There are different ways to do this, but most of them will involve the following command:

git clone https://github.com/<Your-GitHub-Account>/RocketPy.git

After cloning the repository, you will have a copy of the RocketPy repository on your local machine and, by default, you will be on the master branch.

Tip

Cloning a repo means downloading the repository to your local machine and creating a local copy of it. We call this local copy a “local repository”, and the original repository is called the “remote repository”.

When you clone a repository, you are creating a connection between your local repository and the remote repository. This connection allows you to push and pull changes between the two repositories.

Navigating through the project

In order to work on your local repository, you will need to open the directory where you cloned it. We recommend using VS Code as your editor, but you can use any editor you prefer. If you are using VS Code, you can open the project by running the following command:

code <path/to/your/folder>

After opening the project for the first time, you will be at the master branch. To switch to another branch, such as the develop branch, you will need to fetch it from the remote repository and then checkout to it.

git fetch origin develop
git checkout develop

Installation

We highly recommend creating a python virtual environment first. However, we will not describe how to do this here, since this is a common task. Run the commands below inside Rocketpy folder to install the library and development requirements:

pip install -e .  # install the rocketpy lib in editable mode
pip install -r requirements-optional.txt  # install optional requirements
pip install -r requirements-tests.txt  # install test/dev requirements

Tip

When installing the rocketpy library, the requirements listed in the requirements.txt file will automatically be installed.

Running the tests

One simple sanity check you can do after installing rocketpy is to run the unit and integration tests. One may achieve this by running the following commands:

Running all tests:

make pytest

Running the slow tests only:

make pytest-slow

Creating a .html coverage report, where you could see the coverage of the tests:

make coverage-report

Note

The slow tests are the tests marked with the @pytest.mark.slow decorator. These tests are usually the ones that take longer to run, and therefore are not run by default. More about the tests can be found in the Testing Guidelines section