Shopify Python Standards
This repository describes Python development standards at Shopify, and provides some utilities to assist other Python repositories adhere to these standards.
Development Principles
- Make sure your code is readable.
- Don't hesitate to refactor code where it improves the design.
- Don't take shortcuts; development is more like a marathon than a sprint.
- And leave the code cleaner than you found it.
Python Style
Shopify follows the Google Python Style Guide with the following exceptions:
- Line Length: The maximum line length is 120 columns.
- Private Methods and Properties
- Prefix class-private members and properties with double underscores. This invokes name-mangling, which provides some protection against violations of encapsulation.
- Prefix module-private functions and variables with a single underscore.
- Multi-line docstrings: The first line of text (summary line) appears on the same line as the opening three double-quotes.
- Base Class Inheritance
- If a class or nested class inherits from no other base classes, explicitly inherit from object.
- This won't be enforced for our pure Python 3 code, but we will enforce for Python 2 and 2/3 compatbile code.
Versioning
Projects that are producing libraries to be used in other projects should choose their release version numbers using Semantic Versioning 2.0.0, i.e.
Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:
MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes, MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.
Additional labels for pre-release and build metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.
Testing
All committed code requires quality tests that provide ample code coverage. Functionality that is not covered by tests should be assumed to be broken (and probably will be).
Code Review
Committing to master
requires a code review, submitted in the form of a GitHub Pull Request. To be merged, a PR must
have an explicit approval from a core team member and no outstanding questions.
Project Setup
To help you apply these principles this repository contains a pylint plugin and some example files to bootstrap a Python project. When beginning a Python project:
- Start with a
pylintrc
file of this form and disable messages in Python source files if needed as agreed upon by team members- During early development of a project, globally disabling the
fixme
andmissing-docstring
messages viapylintrc
is acceptable but these should be removed before a 1.0.0 release of a library or a production deployment of an application - Install and use the
shopify_python
checker (which thispylintrc
is configured to run) by making arequirements.txt
entry ofgit+https://github.com/Shopify/shopify_python.git@v0.1.2
(replacingv0.1.2
with the latest version number) and installing it via pip (e.g.pip install -r requirements.txt
)
- During early development of a project, globally disabling the
- Use a continuous integration (CI) server such as Travis CI (or an internal alternative) and for each PR require successful runs of:
py.test
to run your unit tests- Use the
pytest-randomly
plugin to randomize test order to eliminate test-order dependencies
- Use the
pylint
to lint your code using pylint's default checkers and theshopify_python
checker defined in this projectmypy
to check type annotations
- Use a
Makefile
similar to the one used by this project to run tests/linters in a similar way on both CI and for local development (or use an internal alternative)
Contributing
Please refer to our Contribution Guidelines