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Contributing

Source: vignettes/contributing.qmd

How to Contribute

Before reading this article, we recommend familiarizing yourself with the overview of how Lifelihood works.

Introduction

This document outlines the guidelines and steps for contributing to the Lifelihood R package. Contributions from the community help improve functionality, address bugs, and ensure that Lifelihood remains robust and up-to-date. This guide covers setting up your development environment, working with Git, and submitting changes.

Setting Up Your Development Environment

To start contributing, you’ll need to set up a local development environment where you can modify, build, and test Lifelihood. Follow these steps to get started:

  • Fork the Repository

  • Clone Your Fork Locally: run the following command in your terminal, replacing yourusername with your GitHub username:

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/Lifelihood.git
cd Lifelihood
git remote add upstream https://github.com/nrode/Lifelihood
git checkout -b feature-name
  • Install Development Dependencies: install all necessary dependencies for development, including Lifelihood itself, by running:
install.packages(c("devtools", "testthat", "roxygen2", "pkgdown"))
remotes::install_local(dependencies = TRUE)

Make changes

All R source code resides in the R/ directory, and only these files are included in the package.

After making changes, you can verify that everything works as expected by running:

devtools::load_all()

This allows you to work with lifelihood functions using your latest local modifications.

Documenting

Documentation for Lifelihood is managed with Roxygen2. If you add or modify functions, update the documentation by running:

devtools::document()

Testing and Validation

Lifelihood includes a suite of unit tests located in the tests/ directory. These tests help ensure that changes don’t break existing functionality. Run tests using:

devtools::test()

Ensure all tests pass before submitting a pull request. Adding new tests for new features or bug fixes is highly encouraged.

Code format

In order to ensure consistent code style, it’s recommend to install Air, an R formatter. The documentation with it has tutorials on how to set up it in your IDE (RStudio, Positron, VS Code, etc).

Submitting a Pull Request (PR)

Once your changes are complete and tested, submit a pull request to propose integrating them into the main Lifelihood repository:

Add, commit and push your branch to your fork on GitHub:

git add -A
git commit -m 'commit description'
git push origin main

Then go to your project fork and click on the “Open a pull request” pop-up.

When a pull request (PR) is opened, GitHub Actions will automatically run checks to validate your changes. These checks include testing the codebase, ensuring consistent documentation, and verifying cross-platform compatibility.

You can view the status of these checks directly in the pull request interface.