spaCy/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contribute to spaCy

Following the v1.0 release, it's time to welcome more contributors into the spaCy project and code base 🎉 This page will give you a quick overview of how things are organised and most importantly, how to get involved.

Table of contents

1. Issues and bug reports
2. Contributing to the code base
3. Adding tests
4. Updating the website
5. Submitting a tutorial
6. Submitting a project to the showcase
7. Code of conduct

Issues and bug reports

First, do a quick search to see if the issue has already been reported. If so, it's often better to just leave a comment on an existing issue, rather than creating a new one.

If you're looking for help with your code, consider posting a question on StackOverflow instead. If you tag it spacy and python, more people will see it and hopefully be able to help.

When opening an issue, use a descriptive title and include your environment (operating system, Python version, spaCy version). Our issue template helps you remember the most important details to include. Pro tip: If you need to share long blocks of code or logs, you can wrap them in <details> and </details>. This collapses the content so it only becomes visible on click, making the issue easier to read and follow.

If you've discovered a bug, you can also submit a regression test straight away. When you're opening an issue to report the bug, simply refer to your pull request in the issue body.

Issue labels

To distinguish issues that are opened by us, the maintainers, we usually add a 💫 to the title. We also use the following system to tag our issues:

Issue label	Description
bug	Bugs and behaviour differing from documentation
enhancement	Feature requests and improvements
install	Installation problems
performance	Accuracy, speed and memory use problems
tests	Missing or incorrect tests
examples	Issues related to the examples
english, german	Issues related to the specific languages, models and data
linux, osx, windows	Issues related to the specific operating systems
pip, conda	Issues related to the specific package managers
duplicate	Duplicates, i.e. issues that have been reported before
meta	Meta topics, e.g. repo organisation and issue management
help wanted	Requests for contributions
help wanted (easy)	Requests for contributions suitable for beginners

Contributing to the code base

You don't have to be an NLP expert or Python pro to contribute, and we're happy to help you get started. If you're new to spaCy, a good place to start is the help wanted (easy) label, which we use to tag bugs and feature requests that are easy and self-contained. If you've decided to take on one of these problems and you're making good progress, don't forget to add a quick comment to the issue. You can also use the issue to ask questions, or share your work in progress.

Conventions for Python

Coming soon.

Conventions for Cython

Coming soon.

Developer resources

The spaCy developer resources repo contains useful scripts, tools and templates for developing spaCy, adding new languages and training new models. If you've written a script that might help others, feel free to contribute it to that repository.

Contributor agreement

If you've made a substantial contribution to spaCy, you should fill in the spaCy contributor agreement to ensure that your contribution can be used across the project. If you agree to be bound by the terms of the agreement, fill in the template and include it with your pull request, or sumit it separately to .github/contributors/. The name of the file should be your GitHub username, with the extension .md. For example, the user example_user would create the file .github/contributors/example_user.md.

Fixing bugs

When fixing a bug, first create an issue if one does not already exist. The description text can be very short – we don't want to make this too bureaucratic.

Next, create a test file named test_issue[ISSUE NUMBER].py in the spacy/tests/regression folder. Test for the bug you're fixing, and make sure the test fails. Next, add and commit your test file referencing the issue number in the commit message. Finally, fix the bug, make sure your test passes and reference the issue in your commit message.

📖 For more information on how to add tests, check out the tests README.

Adding tests

spaCy uses the pytest framework for testing. For more info on this, see the pytest documentation. Tests for spaCy modules and classes live in their own directories of the same name. For example, tests for the Tokenizer can be found in /spacy/tests/tokenizer. To be interpreted and run, all test files and test functions need to be prefixed with test_.

When adding tests, make sure to use descriptive names, keep the code short and concise and only test for one behaviour at a time. Try to parametrize test cases wherever possible, use our pre-defined fixtures for spaCy components and avoid unnecessary imports.

Extensive tests that take a long time should be marked with @pytest.mark.slow. Tests that require the model to be loaded should be marked with @pytest.mark.models. Loading the models is expensive and not necessary if you're not actually testing the model performance. If all you needs ia a Doc object with annotations like heads, POS tags or the dependency parse, you can use the get_doc() utility function to construct it manually.

📖 For more guidelines and information on how to add tests, check out the tests README.

Updating the website

Our website and docs are implemented in Jade/Pug, and built or served by Harp. Jade/Pug is an extensible templating language with a readable syntax, that compiles to HTML. Here's how to view the site locally:

sudo npm install --global harp
git clone https://github.com/explosion/spaCy
cd spaCy/website
harp server

The docs can always use another example or more detail, and they should always be up to date and not misleading. To quickly find the correct file to edit, simply click on the "Suggest edits" button at the bottom of a page.

To make it easy to add content components, we use a collection of custom mixins, like +table, +list or +code.

📖 For more info and troubleshooting guides, check out the website README.

Resources to get you started

• Guide to static websites with Harp and Jade (ines.io)
• Building a website with modular markup components (mixins) (explosion.ai)
• Jade/Pug documentation (pugjs.org)
• Harp documentation (harpjs.com)

Submitting a tutorial

Did you write a tutorial to help others use spaCy, or did you come across one that should be added to our directory? You can submit it by making a pull request to website/docs/usage/_data.json:

{
    "tutorials": {
        "deep_dives": {
            "Deep Learning with custom pipelines and Keras": {
                "url": "https://explosion.ai/blog/spacy-deep-learning-keras",
                "author": "Matthew Honnibal",
                "tags": [ "keras", "sentiment" ]
            }
        }
    }
}

A few tips

• A suitable tutorial should provide additional content and practical examples that are not covered as such in the docs.
• Make sure to choose the right category – first_steps, deep_dives (tutorials that take a deeper look at specific features) or code (programs and scripts on GitHub etc.).
• Don't go overboard with the tags. Take inspirations from the existing ones and only add tags for features ("sentiment", "pos") or integrations ("jupyter", "keras").
• Double-check the JSON markup and/or use a linter. A wrong or missing comma will (unfortunately) break the site rendering.

Submitting a project to the showcase

Have you built a library, visualizer, demo or product with spaCy, or did you come across one that should be featured in our showcase? You can submit it by making a pull request to website/docs/usage/_data.json:

{
    "showcase": {
        "visualizations": {
            "displaCy": {
                "url": "https://demos.explosion.ai/displacy",
                "author": "Ines Montani",
                "description": "An open-source NLP visualiser for the modern web",
                "image": "displacy.jpg"
            }
        }
    }
}

A few tips

• A suitable third-party library should add substantial functionality, be well-documented and open-source. If it's just a code snippet or script, consider submitting it to the code category of the tutorials section instead.
• A suitable demo should be hosted and accessible online. Open-source code is always a plus.
• For visualizations and products, add an image that clearly shows how it looks – screenshots are ideal.
• The image should be resized to 300x188px, optimised using a tool like ImageOptim and added to website/assets/img/showcase.
• Double-check the JSON markup and/or use a linter. A wrong or missing comma will (unfortunately) break the site rendering.

Code of conduct

spaCy adheres to the Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code.