Continuous Integration

CI allows lots of processes to occur automatically

Think of pre-commit as “local” and github actions as cloud.

pre-commit is a tool that runs arbitrary scripts at pre-commit and pre-push time. You can reuse it’s config for github-action based scripts, to ensure all ci scripts are run.
github actions (see .github/workflows) are workflows that run “on the cloud” on github.com. They run based on a few conditions such as pushing/merging, PRs etc. They mainly just setup an linux box to install pre-commit and then duplicate what was being done on a local environment. They also publish our html documentation (such as this page) into the gh-pages branch.

Tools

Pre-commit

pre-commit is both the name of a tool, and of a stage in committing.

This section details what is done at the stages

pre-commit: runs ruff-linting and mypy and mixed-crlf. These are all very fast and ensure commits have barebones checks before going in.
pre-push: runs pytest unit tests as well as coverage

ruff

A simple tool that does linting

mypy

Type-checking tool

mixed-crlf

Ensures that we don’t commit any crlf files. Converts all to lf

pytest

Unit testing framework

coverage

Coverage is a simple tool that tells you what % of your code is covered by tests. This can be easily gamed, for example a test that is assert main() == 0 will result in very high coverage but not necessarily good tests.

sphinx

Generates .rst files and html files automatically. You can inject markdown manually. Check the autodoc page for more information.