Development Guidelines

This page is intended for developers of Zipline, people who want to contribute to the Zipline codebase or documentation, or people who want to install from source and make local changes to their copy of Zipline.

All contributions, bug reports, bug fixes, documentation improvements, enhancements and ideas are welcome. We track issues on GitHub and also have a mailing list where you can ask questions.

Creating a Development Environment

See the install page of this documentation or the README.rst file on the github homepage for this repo

for most installation instructions for development.

Finally, you can build the C extensions by running:

$ python setup.py build_ext --inplace

To finish, make sure tests pass.

If you get an error running nosetests after setting up a conda environment, please try running

# where hca is the name of your conda env
$ conda deactivate hca
$ conda activate hca

Development with Docker

If you want to work with zipline using a Docker container, you’ll need to build the Dockerfile in the Zipline root directory, and then build Dockerfile-dev. Instructions for building both containers can be found in Dockerfile and Dockerfile-dev, respectively.

Style Guide & Running Tests

We use flake8 for checking style requirements and nosetests to run Zipline tests. Our continuous integration tools will run these commands.

Before submitting patches or pull requests, please ensure that your changes pass when running:

$ flake8 zipline tests

In order to run tests locally, you’ll need TA-lib, which you can install on Linux by running:

$ wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ta-lib/ta-lib-0.4.0-src.tar.gz
$ tar -xvzf ta-lib-0.4.0-src.tar.gz
$ cd ta-lib/
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ make
$ sudo make install

You should now be free to run tests:

$ nosetests

Continuous Integration

TBD

Contributing to the Docs

If you’d like to contribute to the documentation, send us a message or a pull-request, and we’ll incorporate in your changes.

We use Sphinx to generate documentation for Zipline., which you will need to install by running:

$ pip install -r ./etc/requirements_docs.txt

To build and view the docs locally, run:

# assuming you're in the Zipline root directory
$ cd docs
$ make html
$ {BROWSER} build/html/index.html

Formatting Docstrings

When adding or editing docstrings for classes, functions, etc, we use numpy as the canonical reference.

Updating the Whatsnew

We have a set of whatsnew files that are used for documenting changes that have occurred between different versions of Zipline. Once you’ve made a change to Zipline, in your Pull Request, please update the most recent whatsnew file with a comment about what you changed. You can find examples in previous whatsnew files.