Development Guidelines

Coding Guidelines

For the most part we try to follow PEP 8 guidelines which can be viewed here: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

There is a useful pep8 command line tool for checking files for pep8 compliance which can be installed with easy_install pep8.

Testing Guidelines

Swift has a comprehensive suite of tests that are run on all submitted code, and it is recommended that developers execute the tests themselves to catch regressions early. Developers are also expected to keep the test suite up-to-date with any submitted code changes.

Swift’s suite of unit tests can be executed in an isolated environment with Tox: http://tox.testrun.org/

To execute the unit tests:

• Install Tox:

  • pip install tox

• If you do not have python 2.6 installed (as in 12.04):

  • Add export TOXENV=py27,pep8 to your ~/.bashrc
  • . ~/.bashrc

• Run Tox from the root of the swift repo:

  • tox

  Remarks: if you installed using: cd ~/swift; sudo python setup.py develop, you may need to do: cd ~/swift; sudo chown -R swift:swift swift.egg-info prior to running tox

• Optionally, run only specific tox builds:

  • tox -e pep8,py26

Documentation Guidelines

The documentation in docstrings should follow the PEP 257 conventions (as mentioned in the PEP 8 guidelines).

More specifically:

1. Triple qutes should be used for all docstrings.
2. If the docstring is simple and fits on one line, then just use one line.
3. For docstrings that take multiple lines, there should be a newline after the opening quotes, and before the closing quotes.
4. Sphinx is used to build documentation, so use the restructured text markup to designate parameters, return values, etc. Documentation on the sphinx specific markup can be found here: http://sphinx.pocoo.org/markup/index.html

Installing Sphinx:

1. Install sphinx (On Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install python-sphinx)
2. python setup.py build_sphinx

License and Copyright

You can have the following copyright and license statement at the top of each source file. Copyright assignment is optional.

New files should contain the current year. Substantial updates can have another year added, and date ranges are not needed.:

# Copyright (c) 2013 OpenStack Foundation.
#
# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
# you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
# You may obtain a copy of the License at
#
#    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
#
# Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
# distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
# WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or
# implied.
# See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
# limitations under the License.