Developer Guide

There are many ways to contribute to the NWBInspector!

Please always begin this process by submitting an Issue ticket on the main repository so we can openly discuss it taking action. Please do not open a Pull Request (PR) until the Issue has been approved by the team.

The most common contribution is to help us add new Best Practices and check functions for them. We have a detailed guide on how to contribute new checks.

Otherwise feel free to raise a bug report, documentation mistake, or general feature request for our maintainers to address!

Coding Style and pre-commit

We use the black coding style with parameters defined in the pyproject.toml configuration file. We use an automated pre-commit bot to enforce these on the main repo, but contributions from external forks would either have to grant bot permissions on their own fork (via the pre-commit bot website) or run pre-commit manually. For instructions to install pre-commit, as well as some other minor coding styles we follow, refer to the NeuroConv style guide.

Adding Custom Checks to the Registry

If you are writing an extension, or have any personal Best Practices specific to your lab, you can incorporate these into your own usage of the NWBInspector. To add a custom check to your default registry, all you have to do is wrap your check function with the register_check decorator like so…

from nwbinspector.register_checks import available_checks, register_check, Importance

@register_check(importance=Importance.SOME_IMPORTANCE_LEVEL, neurodata_type=some_neurodata_type)
def check_personal_practice(...):
    ...

Then, all that is needed for this to be automatically included when you run the inspector through the CLI is to specify the modules flag -m or --modules along with the name of your module that contains the custom check. If using the library instead, you need only import the available_checks global variable from your own submodules, or otherwise import your check functions after importing the nwbinspector in your __init__.py.

Disable Tests That Require Network Connection

Some of the tests in the suite require internet connectivity both to and from the DANDI archive S3 bucket. If this is failing for some reason, you can explicitly control all related tests by setting the environment variable NWBI_SKIP_NETWORK_TESTS to some value able to be parsed by nwbinspector.utils.strtobool. For example, to disable them on a linux system, run

export NWBI_SKIP_NETWORK_TESTS=1

in your environment before running pytest.

Making a Release

To prepare a release, follow these steps and make a new pull request with the changes:

  1. Update the CHANGELOG.md header with the upcoming version number and ensure all upcoming changes are included.

  2. Update the version string in pyproject.toml.

  3. Check the requirements versions and update if needed.

  4. Update dates in docs/conf.py and license.txt to the current year if needed.

After merging, follow these steps:

  1. Create a new git tag. Pull the latest dev branch, then run the following commands (updating the release version) to create the tag and push to GitHub.

release=X.Y.Z
git tag ${release} --sign -m "nwbinspector ${release}"
git push --tags

  1. On the GitHub tags page, click “…” -> “Create release” on the new tag. Fill in the release notes from the CHANGELOG.md and publish the release.

  2. Publishing a release on GitHub will trigger the auto-publish.yml action on the CI that will publish the package on PyPi.

  3. Conda-forge maintains a bot that regularly monitors PyPi for new releases of packages that are also on conda-forge. When a new release is detected, the bot will create a pull request. Follow the instructions in that pull request to update any requirements. Once the PR is approved and merged, a new release will be published on conda-forge.