Lifecycle & automation

All the CI automation and lifecycle management is done through GitHub Actions. There are different rules for different workflows.

Development and branching

Even though we are not strictly using git-flow, we are following a similar branching strategy.

All features are developed in feature branches. git checkout -b feature/my_feature
All features are merged into the develop branch. git checkout develop && git merge feature/my_feature
All bugfixes are developed in bugfix branches. git checkout -b bugfix/my_bugfix

Promote forking of the repository for better collaboration. This is a good practice for open source projects. This will allow you also to have control over rights, permissions and actions environments.
This also allows you to have a separate repository for a contributors own development and testing. Contributers can then make a PR to the main repository when you are ready.
Contributing from forks can only be made through Pull requests, this makes the overall codebase management more transparent.
Furthermore there are specific automations like tests that are triggered on pull requests. This is a good way to make sure that the code is tested before merging, and educates contributors in writing tests.

Tests on every pull request to develop and main branches for all platforms (Linux, Windows, MacOS). Worfklow: pip.yaml.
Automatic build and distribution to pypi on every release. Workflow: pypi.yaml.
Automatic documentation generation. Workflow: docs.yaml.

Update the version number in pyproject.toml. Do the same for the citation file. `CITAION.cff``.
Use the release tag in GitHub to create a new release. This will trigger the automatic build and distribution to pypi. This manual step will trigger the workflow: pypi.yaml.