Contributing#

You can contribute to this website either by submitting a new project or by updating an existing one.

The steps to contribute are described on this page further down. For an easy introduction to how to contribute, you can watch this 16-minute video:

Before you submit any contribution however, you should create an Issue in the project repository detailing the changes you want to make to an existing example, or the details of the new example you want to create.

Setup#

We strongly recommend you to set up the managing environment to be able to validate and test a project locally, before submitting it to this repository:

Fork and Clone the repository#

Create a fork of the repository and then clone your own fork via:

 git clone git@github.com:<YourUsername>/holoviz-topics-examples.git

Create the development environment#

From the top level of your cloned directory, run:

conda env create --file envs/environment.yml
conda activate examples-gallery-manage

Then add the repository as your origin with the following commands:

SSH

git remote add origin git@github.com:holoviz-topics/examples.git

HTTPS

git remote add origin https://github.com/holoviz-topics/examples.git

Add a project#

Once you have an example (one or more notebook(s)) that you think is ready to be shared on this website follow these steps to set it up correctly.

1. Create the project directory#

Its name must be all lower-case, only including underscore as special characters. This name is important as you will have to re-use it as-is in multiple places.

2. Use the template#

Copy the template project from template/anaconda-project.yml to your project. You will use this file as a basis to build your own project. You can further explore the template example folder, which houses a fully executable and deployable project.

Note

Do not forget to clean up the notes left in the template project file once you are done updating it for your own project.

3. Move your notebook(s) to your project directory#

If your project has a single notebook it must share the same name as your project directory. If your project has more than one notebooks, it must have an index.ipynb notebook that will link to your other notebooks.

Your project may have notebooks that are not meant to be displayed on the website, such as pre-processing notebooks. See the skip option to declare them:

skip:
   - data_prep.ipynb

Your notebooks should be committed without output. The system will be in charge of executing your notebooks based on your project characteristics, to build the documentation.

In some cases it is impossible for the system to execute your notebooks. This happens for instance if your notebooks are too long to run, require too much data, require special hardware, etc. In those cases, you should instead commit your notebooks with output and set skip_notebooks_evaluation to true.

4. List the dependencies#

Add to your anaconda-project.yml file the dependencies required to run your notebook(s) and application(s). The recommended practice is to pin all your dependencies using either >= (for easier updates) or ==.

5. Manage the data#

There are multiple ways to manage the data required to run a project:

  • the project does not ingest any data, as it either generates it on the fly or as it just provides written indications on how to get it: set no_data_ingestion to true in the anaconda-project.yml

  • the project needs to download some data, you have two options:

    • fill in the downloads section of the anaconda-project.yml file.

    • or, create an Intake catalog and load it in your notebooks, the catalog must be named catalog.yml and be at the root of your project

  • the project relies on some very light data, then it can be committed to the repository as is. It must be stored in a data/ subfolder of your project

When using an Intake catalog, point the cache to the data dir in the project by defining the INTAKE_CACHE_DIR variable in the anaconda-project.yml file:

variables:
  INTAKE_CACHE_DIR: data

This way when the user runs the notebook, they will still be able to see the data from within the project directory

6. Testing#

Your project will be automatically tested by the system:

  • the notebooks will be linted with flake8. If you deem that the linter is too strict, you can add some more rules to ignore to the pyproject.toml configuration file

  • the notebooks will be remotely executed with nbval, the tests failing if an error occurs during their execution

If you project has some special testing needs, you can implement your own testing command by adding a test command to the anaconda-project.yml file. You will presumably also need to declare testing dependencies, you can do so by extending the default dependencies.

Projects that download data must provide a test dataset that is a reduced version of their full dataset, which should be small enough to be committed to the repository. These datasets must be saved in the test_data folder in a folder named as the project. When the system will test your project, it will move your test data to the right place, i.e. your datasets to the data/ subfolder and will replace your Intake catalog. This step allows automated tests to be run in a practical way, exercising all of the example’s functionality but on a feasible subset of the data involved.

7. Complete the anaconda-project file#

Follow the instructions provided in the template/anaconda-project.yml file.

8. Add a thumbnail#

Create a nice but lightweight PNG thumbnail (maximum size of 1MB) with an aspect ratio between 0.9 and 1.5. Name it as your project if you have only one notebook or as index.png if you have multiple notebooks, and save it in the thumbnails subfolder of your project.

9. Locking#

You must lock your project to capture the full set of dependencies that are required to execute it.

From your root directory, Run:

doit lock:<projectname>

replacing <projectname> with your project name.

Note

All doit commands must be run from the root directory.

10. Make sure it works#

If you have declared commands run them to check that they work as expected, as this is what the users of your project will ultimately use. Run:

anaconda-project run <commandname>

11. Build the site locally#

Build the site locally to make sure it looks the way you expect when it is eventually deployed.

To do this:

  1. Run the project notebook(s), don’t clear their output.

  2. Run:

    doit doc_one --name <projectname>

This command copies the notebooks in ./doc/gallery/<projectname> along with other files needed to build the docs (thumbnails, archive, assets, etc.), and builds the docs with Sphinx.

  1. Open the built site on your web browser via: ./builtdocs/index.html

  2. Clean up this process by running doit clean doc_one and then commit the notebook(s) without output.

12. Validate, test, and build#

After viewing the built site, you should run locally the steps that are going to be run on the CI.

Start by validating that your project is well specified by running

doit validate:<projectname>

Update your project until you have no validation warning left.

Run doit clean --clean-dep validate:<projectname> to clean up that step.

Now you will test your project by running:

doit test:<projectname>

Update your project until the tests pass.

Run doit clean --clean-dep test:<projectname> to clean up that step.

If you built the site locally without any errors, you can skip this final build step. However, the command to run it for debugging purposes is:

doit build:<projectname>

After validating and testing the project, this step should succeeed.

Run doit clean --clean-dep build:<projectname> to clean up that step.

13. Open a Pull Request#

Open a Pull Request that adds your project to the repository. The CI will take care of validating, testing and building it. If these steps succeed the developer website will be built and you will be able to check a rendered version of your project at https://holoviz-dev.github.io/examples/.

When the review of your Pull Request is completed and it is merged, the CI will then take care of updating the main site. If you declared deployments, the CI will also take care of automatically starting them.

Update a project#

To update an existing project, follow these simple steps.

1. Choose the project#

Navigate to the selected project directory and execute the following command:

anaconda-project run notebook

This command opens the project notebook in your web browser. If there are multiple notebooks in the project, run:

anaconda-project run <notebook name>

Replace <notebook name> with the desired notebook’s name.

Remember to commit the updated notebooks without output.

2. Finalize the update#

To complete the process, follow the steps outlined in Step 12 in the Add a project section and continue until Step 13 which completes the process.

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