Contributing Guide

Contributing to pyfakefs

We welcome any contributions that help to improve pyfakefs for the community. Contributions may include bug reports, bug fixes, new features, infrastructure enhancements, or documentation updates.

How to contribute

Reporting Bugs

If you think you found a bug in pyfakefs, you can create an issue. Before filing the bug, please check, if it still exists in the main branch. If you can reproduce the problem, please provide enough information so that it can be reproduced by other developers. This includes:

  • The Operating System

  • The Python version

  • A minimal example to reproduce the problem (preferably in the form of a failing test)

  • The stack trace in case of an unexpected exception. For better readability, you may use markdown code formatting for any included code.

Proposing Enhancements

If you need a specific feature that is not implemented, or have an idea for a useful addition, you may also create a respective issue. As usually, implementing it yourself is the best chance to get it done! The next item has some information on doing this.

Contributing Code

The preferred workflow for contributing code is to fork the repository on GitHub, clone it, develop on a feature branch, and create a pull request when done. There are a few things to consider for contributing code:

  • We ensure the PEP-8 coding style by using black auto-format in a pre-commit hook. We recommend to locally install pre-commit (pre-commit install) to run the linter tests on check-in, or run the tests on demand (pre-commit run --all-files).

  • Use the Google documentation style to document new public classes or methods.

  • Provide unit tests for bug fixes or new functionality - check the existing tests for examples.

  • Provide meaningful commit messages - it is ok to amend the commits to improve the comments.

  • Check that the automatic GitHub Action CI tests all pass for your pull request.

  • Be ready to adapt your changes after a code review.

Contributing Documentation

If you want to improve the existing documentation, you can do this also using a pull request. You can contribute to:

To build the documentation locally, you need to install the needed dependencies by calling

python -m pip install .[doc]

from your source directory. Then you can create the documentation:

cd docs
make html

The generated documentation will be located under docs/html.

Thank you for taking the time to contribute to pyfakefs!