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Getting Started

We're glad to have you joining us, taking a few minutes to read the following pages will help you be a better member of our community:

If you are new to open source, or unfamiliar to contributing to open source projects, it might be beneficial to read this guide. We welcome and value all contributions to Open States, including (but not limited to!) code contributions.

This guide assumes a basic familiarity with using the command line, git, and Python. If you are unfamiliar with something that is mentioned in this guide, we encourage you to read the linked resources.

No matter how experienced you are, it is a good idea to read through this section before diving into Open States' code.

No worries if you aren't an expert though, we'll walk you through the steps. And as for Python, if you've written other languages like Javascript or Ruby you'll probably be just fine. Here's a great guide on getting started installing and managing Python versions.

Don't be afraid to ask for help either!

Project Overview

Open States is a fairly large & somewhat complex project comprised of many moving parts with a long history.

As you look to contribute, it may be beneficial to understand a little bit about the various components.

These repositories make up the core of the project, if you're looking to contribute there's a 95% chance one of these is what you want.

Installing Prerequisites

poetry

If you're working on the people repo, api-v3, or want to work on scrapers without Docker, you'll need poetry to build your Python virtual environment.

Note

If you haven't used poetry before, it is similar to pipenv, pip, and conda in that it manages a Python virtualenv on your behalf.

Installing Poetry

The official poetry docs recommend installing with:

curl -sSL https://install.python-poetry.org | python3 -

Then within each repo you check out, be sure to run:

poetry install

Which will fetch the correct version of dependencies.

docker & docker-compose

When working on scrapers or openstates.org, you have the option to use Docker.

The first thing you will need to do is get a working docker environment on your local machine. We'll do this using Docker. No worries if you aren't familiar with Docker, you'll barely have to touch it beyond what this guide explains.

Install Docker and docker-compose (if not already installed on your local system):

(a) Installing Docker:

(Docker Compose is probably already installed by step 1(a) if not, proceed to step 1(b))

(b) Installing docker-compose:

Ensure that Docker and docker-compose are installed locally:

$ docker --version
Docker version 19.03.4, build 9013bf5
$ docker-compose --version
docker-compose version 1.24.1, build 4667896b

Of course, your versions will differ, but ensure they are relatively recent to avoid strange issues.

pre-commit

To help keep the code as managable as possible we strongly recommend you use pre-commit to make sure all commits adhere to our preferred style.

  • See pre-commit's installation instructions

  • Within each repo you check out, run pre-commit install after checking out. It should look something like:

    $ pre-commit install
pre-commit installed at .git/hooks/pre-commit

Note

If you're running flake8 and black yourself via your editor or similar this isn't strictly necessary, but we find it helps ensure commits don't fail linting. We require all PRs to pass linting!

What is linting?

Recent Major Work

To give a sense of recent priorities, here are major milestones from the past few years:

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