Contributor’s Guide

If you’re reading this, you’re probably interested in contributing to Requests.Thank you very much! Open source projects live-and-die based on the supportthey receive from others, and the fact that you’re even consideringcontributing to the Requests project isvery generous of you.

This document lays out guidelines and advice for contributing to this project.If you’re thinking of contributing, please start by reading this document andgetting a feel for how contributing to this project works. If you have anyquestions, feel free to reach out to eitherNate Prewitt,Ian Cordasco,orSeth Michael Larson, the primary maintainers.

The guide is split into sections based on the type of contribution you’rethinking of making, with a section that covers general guidelines for allcontributors.

Code of Conduct

The Python community is made up of members from around the globe with a diverseset of skills, personalities, and experiences. It is through these differencesthat our community experiences great successes and continued growth. When you’reworking with members of the community, follow thePython Software Foundation Code of Conduct to help steer your interactionsand keep Python a positive, successful, and growing community.

Get Early Feedback

If you are contributing, do not feel the need to sit on your contribution untilit is perfectly polished and complete. It helps everyone involved for you toseek feedback as early as you possibly can. Submitting an early, unfinishedversion of your contribution for feedback in no way prejudices your chances ofgetting that contribution accepted, and can save you from putting a lot of workinto a contribution that is not suitable for the project.

Contribution Suitability

Our project maintainers have the last word on whether or not a contribution issuitable for Requests. All contributions will be considered carefully, but fromtime to time, contributions will be rejected because they do not suit thecurrent goals or needs of the project.

If your contribution is rejected, don’t despair! As long as you followed theseguidelines, you will have a much better chance of getting your nextcontribution accepted.

Code Contributions

Steps for Submitting Code

When contributing code, you’ll want to follow this checklist:

  1. Fork the repository on GitHub.

  2. Run the tests to confirm they all pass on your system. If they don’t, you’llneed to investigate why they fail. If you’re unable to diagnose thisyourself, raise it as a bug report by following the guidelines in thisdocument:Bug Reports.

  3. Write tests that demonstrate your bug or feature. Ensure that they fail.

  4. Make your change.

  5. Run the entire test suite again, confirming that all tests passincludingthe ones you just added.

  6. Send a GitHub Pull Request to the main repository’smain branch.GitHub Pull Requests are the expected method of code collaboration on thisproject.

The following sub-sections go into more detail on some of the points above.

Code Review

Contributions will not be merged until they’ve been code reviewed. You shouldimplement any code review feedback unless you strongly object to it. In theevent that you object to the code review feedback, you should make your caseclearly and calmly. If, after doing so, the feedback is judged to still apply,you must either apply the feedback or withdraw your contribution.

Code Style

Requests uses a collection of tools to ensure the code base has a consistentstyle as it grows. We have these orchestrated using a tool calledpre-commit. This can be installed locally and run over your changes priorto opening a PR, and will also be run as part of the CI approval processbefore a change is merged.

You can find the full list of formatting requirements specified in the.pre-commit-config.yaml at the top level directory of Requests.

New Contributors

If you are new or relatively new to Open Source, welcome! Requests aims tobe a gentle introduction to the world of Open Source. If you’re concerned abouthow best to contribute, please consider mailing a maintainer (listed above) andasking for help.

Please also check theGet Early Feedback section.

Documentation Contributions

Documentation improvements are always welcome! The documentation files live inthedocs/ directory of the codebase. They’re written inreStructuredText, and useSphinx to generate the full suite ofdocumentation.

When contributing documentation, please do your best to follow the style of thedocumentation files. This means a soft-limit of 79 characters wide in your textfiles and a semi-formal, yet friendly and approachable, prose style.

When presenting Python code, use single-quoted strings ('hello' instead of"hello").

Bug Reports

Bug reports are hugely important! Before you raise one, though, please checkthrough theGitHub issues,both open and closed, to confirm that the bughasn’t been reported before. Duplicate bug reports are a huge drain on the timeof other contributors, and should be avoided as much as possible.

Feature Requests

Requests is in a perpetual feature freeze, only the BDFL can add or approve ofnew features. The maintainers believe that Requests is a feature-completepiece of software at this time.

One of the most important skills to have while maintaining a largely-usedopen source project is learning the ability to say “no” to suggested changes,while keeping an open ear and mind.

If you believe there is a feature missing, feel free to raise a featurerequest, but please do be aware that the overwhelming likelihood is that yourfeature request will not be accepted.