CONTRIBUTING.md

Contribution Guidelines

Generally, the following practices are recommended for making contributions to cobrapy. These aren't all necessarily hard-and-fast rules, but should serve as guidelines in most cases.

1. Please comment code.
2. All new python code should be pep8 compliant.
3. Please use git best practices, with a 50 line summary for each commit. Generally, separate features should be made in separate commits so they can be tested and merged independently. For example, adding a new solver would be a separate commit from fixing whitespace in cobra.core.
4. Documentation is written as IPython/jupyter notebooks in the documentation_builder directory, which are then converted to rst by the autodoc.sh script.
5. Tests are in the cobra/test directory. They are automatically run through continuous integration services on both python 2 and python 3 when pull requests are made.
6. Please write tests for new functions. Writing documentation as well would also be very helpful.
7. Ensure code will work with both python 2 and python 3. For example, instead of my_dict.iteritems() use six.iteritems(my_dict)

Thank you very much for contributing to cobrapy.