Developer guide

Getting started

Contributions to this service are welcome.

A contribution can be either be a patch or a minor/major feature. Patches include bugfixes and small changes to the code. Features can either be minor or major developments and can include potentially disruptive changes.

Development cycle

Makefile targets have been included to facilitate easier and more consistent development. The general recipe is as follows:

Depending on the fix type, create a new major/minor/patch branch, e.g.
```
make patch-branch NAME=some-name
```
Note that this both creates and checkouts the branch.
Make your changes.
Add your changes to the branch:
```
git add ...
```
Either commit the changes manually (if no version increment is needed) or bump the version and commit, entering a commit message when prompted:
```
make bump-and-commit
```
Push the changes upstream when ready:
```
make push
```

Adding a new ingestion backend

To incorporate a new ingestion backend, create a new class derived from the ingestion.backends.backend.IngestionBackend base class and override the upload and add_metadata_to_existing_file methods, ensuring that you maintain the base function’s signatures for these methods.

You will also need to amend the srcnet-tools-ingest “binary” and ingestion.ingest.Ingest class constructor to accommodate the new class, as well as adding an entry to the ingestion.backends.backend.IngestionBackendTypes enumerator.

Documentation

There is a Makefile target for generating documentation locally:

make docs

but you will need to ensure the necessary sphinx extensions are installed as these are not included in the core requirements.