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Contributing

Overview

Each tutorial is a Jupyter notebook file. The notebooks are each saved in a separate directory within the tutorials/notebooks subdirectory in this project. For an example, let's look at the source notebook of the FITS-header tutorial. Within tutorials/notebooks/FITS-header, there is a single Jupyter notebook file that contains the text and code for the tutorial, and any small data files used in the tutorial (in this case, a single FITS file). The notebook file is automatically run and converted into a static HTML page (for example), which is then displayed in the tutorial listing on the main tutorials webpage, http://tutorials.astropy.org. Each tutorial notebook file also contains information such as the author's name, month and year it was written, and any other metadata that should be associated with the tutorial.

Content Guidelines

Overview

  • Each tutorial should have 3–5 explicit Learning Goals, demonstrate ~2–3 pieces of functionality relevant to astronomy, and 2–3 demonstrations of generic but commonly used functionality (e.g., numpy, matplotlib)
  • Roughly follow this progression:
    • Input/Output: read in some data (use astroquery where possible to query real astronomical datasets)
    • Analysis: do something insightful / useful with the data
    • Visualization: make a pretty figure (use astropy.visualization where possible)
  • The tutorials must be compatible with the versions supported by the last major release of the Astropy core package (i.e. Python >= 3.5).

Code

  • Demonstrate good commenting practice
    • add comments to sections of code that use concepts not included in the Learning Goals
  • Demonstrate best practices of variable names
    • Variables should be all lower case with words separated by underscores
    • Variable names should be descriptive, e.g., galaxy_mass, u_mag
  • Use the print function explicitly to display information about variables
  • As much as possible, comply with PEP8.
  • Imports
    • Do not use from package import *; import packages, classes, and functions explicitly.
    • Follow recommended package name abbreviations:
      • import numpy as np
      • import matplotlib as mpl
      • import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
      • import astropy.units as u
      • import astropy.coordinates as coord
      • from astropy.io import fits
  • Display figures inline using matplotlib's inline backend:
    • %matplotlib inline # make plots display in notebooks

Narrative

  • Please read through the other tutorials to get a sense of the desired tone and length.
  • Use Markdown formatting in text cells for formatting, links, latex, and code snippets.
  • Title should be short yet descriptive and emphasize the learning goals of the tutorial. Try to make the title appeal to a broad audience and avoid referencing a specific instrument, catalog, or anything wavelength dependent.
  • List all author's full names (comma separated) and link to GitHub profile and/or ORCID iD when relevant.
  • Include Learning Goals at the top as a bulleted list.
  • Include Keywords as a comma separated list of topics, packages, and functions demonstrated.
  • The first paragraph should give a brief overview of the entire tutorial including relevant astronomy concepts.
  • Use the first-person inclusive plural ("we"). For example, "We are going to make a plot which..", "Above, we did it the hard way, but here is the easier way..."
  • Section headings should be in the imperative mood. For example, "Download the data."
  • Avoid words such as "obviously", "just", "simply", "easily". For example, avoid "we just have to do this one thing."
  • Use <div class="alert alert-info">Note</div> for Notes and <div class="alert alert-warning">Warning</div> for Warnings (Markdown supports raw HTML)

Template intro

# Title name

## Authors
Jane Smith, Jose Jones

## Learning Goals
* Query the ... dataset
* Calculate ...
* Display ...

## Keywords
Example, example, example

## Companion Content
Carroll & Ostlie 10.3, Binney & Tremaine 1.5

## Summary
In this tutorial, we download a data file, do something to it, and then
visualize it.

Procedure for Contributing

The process for contributing a tutorial involves the GitHub fork and git workflow concepts branch, push, pull request.

To contribute a new tutorial, first fork the astropy-tutorials repository. Then, clone your fork locally to your machine (replace <GITHUB USERNAME> with your GitHub username):

git clone git@github.com:<GITHUB USERNAME>/astropy-tutorials.git

Next, create a branch in your local repository with the name of the tutorial you'd like to contribute. Let's imagine we're adding a tutorial to demonstrate spectral line fitting -- we might call it "Spectral-Line-Fitting":

git checkout -b Spectral-Line-Fitting

The notebook files must be written as a single Jupyter notebook in a directory within the tutorials/notebooks directory. The name of the notebook must be the same as the subdirectory name. We'll create a new directory in tutorials/notebooks with the same name as the branch:

mkdir tutorials/notebooks/Spectral-Line-Fitting

All files used by the tutorial -- e.g., example data files, the Jupyter notebook file itself -- should go in this directory.

Specify the python packages the tutorial depends on by creating a text file called requirements.txt in the same notebook directory. For example, if your tutorial requires scipy version 1.0 and numpy version 1.13 or greater, your requirements.txt file would look like:

scipy==1.0
numpy>=1.13

To see an example, have a look at the FITS-header requirements.txt file.

Push the notebook and other files from your local branch up to your fork of the repository on GitHub (by default, named 'origin'):

git push origin Spectral-Line-Fitting

When the tutorial is ready for broader community feedback, open a pull request against the main astropy-tutorials repository in order for the community to review the new tutorial.

Data Files

For tutorial authors

If your tutorial includes large data files (where large means >~ 1 MB), we don't want to include them in the astropy/astropy-tutorials git repository, as that will drastically slow down cloning the repository. Instead, we encourage use of the astropy.utils.download_files function, and will host data files on the http://data.astropy.org server. To do this, use the following procedure:

  • When writing your tutorial, include the files in your tutorial's directory (e.g., tutorials/notebooks/My-tutorial-name/mydatafile.fits). Those who are reviewing your tutorial will have to download them, but they would need them anyway, so it's ok. IMPORTANT: when you add or modify data files, make sure the only thing in that commit involves the data files. That is, do not edit your notebook and add/change data files in the same commit. This will make it much easier to remove the data files when your tutorial is actually merged.

  • To actually access your data files in the notebook, do something like this at the top of the notebook:

    from astropy.utils.data import download_file

tutorialpath = ''
mydatafilename1 = download_file(tutorialpath + 'mydatafile1.fits', cache=True)
mydatafilename2 = download_file(tutorialpath + 'mydatafile2.dat', cache=True)

    And then use them like this:

    fits.open(mydatafilename1)
...
with open(mydatafilename2) as f:
    ...

    If you do this, the only change necessary on merging your notebook will be to set tutorialpath to 'http://data.astropy.org/tutorials/My-tutorial-name/'.

If you need information or help with:

  • previewing how the rendered Jupyter notebooks will look on the tutorial webpage
  • marking a cell with an intentional / expected error

please see the :ref:`dev-page`.

For repository maintainers

If this above procedure is followed, you only need to do these steps when merging your pull request:

  1. Do git rebase -i and delete the commits that include the data files
  2. Upload the data files to http://data.astropy.org/tutorials/My-tutorial-name/
  3. Update the tutorialpath variable.