Contributing to nose

You’d like to contribute to nose? Great! Now that nose is hosted under GitHub, contributing is even easier.

Get the code!

Start by getting a local working copy of nose from github:

git clone https://github.com/nose-devs/nose

If you plan to submit changes back to the core repository, you should set up a public fork of your own somewhere (GitHub is a good place to do that). See GitHub’s help for details on how to contribute to a Git hosted project like nose.

Running nose’s tests

nose runs its own test suite with tox <http://codespeak.net/tox/>. You don’t have to install tox to run nose’s test suite, but you should, because tox makes it easy to run all tests on all supported python versions. You’ll also need python 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 3.1 and jython installed somewhere in your $PATH.

Discuss

Join the nose developer list at google groups. It’s low-traffic and mostly signal.

What to work on?

You can find a list of open issues at nose’s issue tracker. If you’d like to work on an issue, leave a comment on the issue detailing how you plan to fix it, or simply submit a pull request.

I have a great idea for a plugin…

Great! Write it. Release it on pypi. If it gains a large following, and becomes stable enough to work with nose’s 6+ month release cycles, it may be a good candidate for inclusion in nose’s builtin plugins.