Contributing

If you are thinking about making Mopidy better, or you just want to hack on it, that’s great. Here are some tips to get you started.

Getting started

  1. Make sure you have a GitHub account.
  2. Submit a ticket for your issue, assuming one does not already exist. Clearly describe the issue including steps to reproduce when it is a bug.
  3. Fork the repository on GitHub.

Making changes

  1. Clone your fork on GitHub to your computer.
  2. Consider making a Python virtualenv for Mopidy development to wall of Mopidy and it’s dependencies from the rest of your system. If you do so, create the virtualenv with the --system-site-packages flag so that Mopidy can use globally installed dependencies like GStreamer. If you don’t use a virtualenv, you may need to run the following pip and python setup.py commands with sudo to install stuff globally on your computer.
  3. Install dependencies as described in the Installation section.
  4. Checkout a new branch (usually based on develop) and name it accordingly to what you intend to do.
    • Features get the prefix feature/
    • Bug fixes get the prefix fix/
    • Improvements to the documentation get the prefix docs/

Running Mopidy from Git

If you want to hack on Mopidy, you should run Mopidy directly from the Git repo.

  1. Go to the Git repo root:

    cd mopidy/
    
  2. To get a mopidy executable and register all bundled extensions with setuptools, run:

    python setup.py develop
    

    It still works to run python mopidy directly on the mopidy Python package directory, but if you have never run python setup.py develop the extensions bundled with Mopidy isn’t registered with setuptools, so Mopidy will start without any frontends or backends, making it quite useless.

  3. Now you can run the Mopidy command, and it will run using the code in the Git repo:

    mopidy
    

    If you do any changes to the code, you’ll just need to restart mopidy to see the changes take effect.

Testing

Mopidy has quite good test coverage, and we would like all new code going into Mopidy to come with tests.

  1. To run tests, you need a couple of dependencies. They can be installed using pip:

    pip install --upgrade coverage flake8 mock nose
    
  2. Then, to run all tests, go to the project directory and run:

    nosetests
    

    To run tests with test coverage statistics, remember to specify the tests dir:

    nosetests --with-coverage tests/
    
  3. Check the code for errors and style issues using flake8:

    flake8 .
    

For more documentation on testing, check out the nose documentation.

Submitting changes

Additional resources