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Contributing to Astroquery

The first official release of astroquery occurred in September 2013.

Please see astropy's contributing guildelines for a general guide to the workflow involving git, etc. Everything below is astroquery-specific.

New Features

We welcome any and all new features! If you have your own little query tool you wrote to access some obscure service, feel free to clean it up a little and submit it as a pull request (PR)! However, we'll ask you to at least write some simple tests and do your best to get the API to match the astroquery API.

Tests are welcome and encouraged, but can be built up over time. At least one example use is necessary for a new module to be accepted.

The template module should be the starting point for any new contribution. It includes detailed explanations of each function and class and can straightforwardly be filled out.

As shown in the template module, the minimum requirements for a new feature are:

  • Add the feature as a subdirectory of astroquery with at least an __init__.py and a core.py:

    astroquery/feature
astroquery/feature/__init__.py
astroquery/feature/core.py

  • Add a tests/ directory with at least one test:

    astroquery/feature/tests
astroquery/feature/tests/__init__.py
astroquery/feature/tests/test_feature.py

  • Add some documentation - at least one example, but it can be sparse at first:

    docs/astroquery/feature.rst

PRs will not be accepted if tests fail.

Important Guidelines

Astroquery is based on the requests module. All contributions must be based on the requests module and should not use urllib or any of the base python url modules unless there is a demonstrated necessity.

The requests module also generally should not be directly used, since the astroquery.query.BaseQuery class, which all astroquery classes should inherit from, provides access to its own _request method. This custom _request method is a wrapper around the requests.request function that provides important astroquery-specific utility, including caching, HTTP header generation, progressbars, and local writing-to-disk.