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You can contribute to the project in multiple ways:

  • Write documentation
  • Implement features
  • Fix bugs
  • Add unit and functional tests
  • Everything else you can think of

Issue Management and Our Approach to Contributions

We value every contribution and bug report. However, as an open-source project with limited maintainer resources, we rely heavily on the community to help us move forward.

Our Policy on Inactive Issues:

To keep our issue tracker manageable and focused on actionable items, we have the following approach:

  • We encourage reporters to propose solutions: If you report an issue, we strongly encourage you to also think about how it might be fixed and try to implement that fix.
  • Community interest is key: Issues that garner interest from the community (e.g., multiple users confirming, discussions on solutions, offers to help) are more likely to be addressed.
  • Closing inactive issues: If an issue report doesn't receive a proposed fix from the original reporter or anyone else in the community, and there's no active discussion or indication that someone is willing to work on it after a reasonable period, it may be closed.
    • When closing such an issue, we will typically leave a comment explaining that it's being closed due to inactivity and a lack of a proposed fix.
  • Reopening issues: This doesn't mean the issue isn't valid. If you (or someone else) are interested in working on a fix for a closed issue, please comment on the issue. We are more than happy to reopen it and discuss your proposed pull request or solution. We greatly appreciate it when community members take ownership of fixing issues they care about.

We believe this approach helps us focus our efforts effectively and empowers the community to contribute directly to the areas they are most passionate about.

Development workflow

Before contributing, install tox and pre-commit:

pip3 install --user tox pre-commit
cd python-gitlab/
pre-commit install -t pre-commit -t commit-msg --install-hooks

This will help automate adhering to code style and commit message guidelines described below.

If you don't like using pre-commit, feel free to skip installing it, but please ensure all your commit messages and code pass all default tox checks outlined below before pushing your code.

When you're ready or if you'd like to get feedback, please provide your patches as Pull Requests on GitHub.

Commit message guidelines

We enforce commit messages to be formatted using the Conventional Commits. This creates a clearer project history, and automates our Releases and changelog generation. Examples:

  • Bad: Added support for release links
  • Good: feat(api): add support for release links
  • Bad: Update documentation for projects
  • Good: docs(projects): update example for saving project attributes

Coding Style

We use black and isort to format our code, so you'll need to make sure you use it when committing.

Pre-commit hooks will validate and format your code, so you can then stage any changes done if the commit failed.

To format your code according to our guidelines before committing, run:

cd python-gitlab/
tox -e black,isort

Running unit tests

Before submitting a pull request make sure that the tests and lint checks still succeed with your change. Unit tests and functional tests run in GitHub Actions and passing checks are mandatory to get merge requests accepted.

Please write new unit tests with pytest and using responses. An example can be found in tests/unit/objects/test_runner.py

You need to install tox (pip3 install tox) to run tests and lint checks locally:

# run unit tests using all python3 versions available on your system, and all lint checks:
tox

# run unit tests in one python environment only (useful for quick testing during development):
tox -e py311

# run unit and smoke tests in one python environment only
tox -e py312,smoke

# build the documentation - the result will be generated in build/sphinx/html/:
tox -e docs

# build and serve the documentation site locally for validating changes
tox -e docs-serve

# List all available tox environments
tox list

# "label" based tests. These use the '-m' flag to tox

# run all the linter checks:
tox -m lint

# run only the unit tests:
tox -m unit

# run the functional tests. This is very time consuming:
tox -m func

Running integration tests

Integration tests run against a running gitlab instance, using a docker container. You need to have docker installed on the test machine, and your user must have the correct permissions to talk to the docker daemon.

To run these tests:

# run the CLI tests:
tox -e cli_func_v4

# run the python API tests:
tox -e api_func_v4

When developing tests it can be a little frustrating to wait for GitLab to spin up every run. To prevent the containers from being cleaned up afterwards, pass --keep-containers to pytest, i.e.:

tox -e api_func_v4 -- --keep-containers

If you then wish to test against a clean slate, you may perform a manual clean up of the containers by running:

docker-compose -f tests/functional/fixtures/docker-compose.yml -p pytest-python-gitlab down -v

By default, the tests run against the latest version of the gitlab/gitlab-ce image. You can override both the image and tag by providing either the GITLAB_IMAGE or GITLAB_TAG environment variables.

This way you can run tests against different versions, such as nightly for features in an upcoming release, or an older release (e.g. 12.8.0-ce.0). The tag must match an exact tag on Docker Hub:

# run tests against ``nightly`` or specific tag
GITLAB_TAG=nightly tox -e api_func_v4
GITLAB_TAG=12.8.0-ce.0 tox -e api_func_v4

# run tests against the latest gitlab EE image
GITLAB_IMAGE=gitlab/gitlab-ee tox -e api_func_v4

A freshly configured gitlab container will be available at http://localhost:8080 (login root / password 5iveL!fe). A configuration for python-gitlab will be written in /tmp/python-gitlab.cfg.

To cleanup the environment delete the container:

docker rm -f gitlab-test
docker rm -f gitlab-runner-test

Pass options to pytest

Options to pytest can be passed by adding them after -- when running tox:

tox -e api_func_v4 -- <pytest options>.

For example, you can use this to run a specific test. Running all tests can be time-consuming, so this allows you to focus on just the tests relevant to your changes. You can do this by passing the -k flag to pytest and setting a relevant expression to select the tests to run. For example:

# Run all API functional tests from the ``test_projects.py`` file:
tox -e api_func_v4 -- --keep-containers -k test_projects.py

# Run only the ``test_get_project`` test method from the ``test_projects.py`` file:
tox -e api_func_v4 -- --keep-containers -k "test_projects.py and test_create_project"

# The above will select all test methods start with ``test_create_project`` from the ``test_projects.py`` file.
# To select only the ``test_create_project`` method, you can exclude other methods by using the ``not`` operator:
tox -e api_func_v4 -- --keep-containers -k "test_projects.py and test_create_project and not test_create_project_"

Rerunning failed CI workflows

  • Ask the maintainers to add the ok-to-test label on the PR

  • Post a comment in the PR

    /rerun-all - rerun all failed workflows

    /rerun-workflow <workflow name> - rerun a specific failed workflow

The functionality is provided by rerun-action <https://github.com/marketplace/actions/rerun-actions>

Releases

A release is automatically published once a month on the 28th if any commits merged to the main branch contain commit message types that signal a semantic version bump (fix, feat, BREAKING CHANGE:).

Additionally, the release workflow can be run manually by maintainers to publish urgent fixes, either on GitHub or using the gh CLI with gh workflow run release.yml.

Note: As a maintainer, this means you should carefully review commit messages used by contributors in their pull requests. If scopes such as fix and feat are applied to trivial commits not relevant to end users, it's best to squash their pull requests and summarize the addition in a single conventional commit. This avoids triggering incorrect version bumps and releases without functional changes.

The release workflow uses python-semantic-release and does the following:

  • Bumps the version in _version.py and adds an entry in CHANGELOG.md,
  • Commits and tags the changes, then pushes to the main branch as the github-actions user,
  • Creates a release from the tag and adds the changelog entry to the release notes,
  • Uploads the package as assets to the GitHub release,
  • Uploads the package to PyPI using PYPI_TOKEN (configured as a secret).