Submitting contributions

We’re always grateful for contributions to Django’s code. Indeed, bug reports with associated contributions will get fixed far more quickly than those without a solution.

Typo fixes and trivial documentation changes

If you are fixing a really trivial issue, for example changing a word in the documentation, the preferred way to provide the patch is using GitHub pull requests without a Trac ticket.

See the Working with Git and GitHub for more details on how to use pull requests.

“Claiming” tickets

In an open-source project with hundreds of contributors around the world, it’s important to manage communication efficiently so that work doesn’t get duplicated and contributors can be as effective as possible.

Hence, our policy is for contributors to “claim” tickets in order to let other developers know that a particular bug or feature is being worked on.

If you have identified a contribution you want to make and you’re capable of fixing it (as measured by your coding ability, knowledge of Django internals and time availability), claim it by following these steps:

  • Login using your GitHub account or create an account in our ticket system. If you have an account but have forgotten your password, you can reset it using the password reset page.

  • If a ticket for this issue doesn’t exist yet, create one in our ticket tracker.

  • If a ticket for this issue already exists, make sure nobody else has claimed it. To do this, look at the “Owned by” section of the ticket. If it’s assigned to “nobody,” then it’s available to be claimed. Otherwise, somebody else may be working on this ticket. Either find another bug/feature to work on, or contact the developer working on the ticket to offer your help. If a ticket has been assigned for weeks or months without any activity, it’s probably safe to reassign it to yourself.

  • Log into your account, if you haven’t already, by clicking “GitHub Login” or “DjangoProject Login” in the upper left of the ticket page. Once logged in, you can then click the “Modify Ticket” button near the bottom of the page.

  • Claim the ticket by clicking the “assign to” radio button in the “Action” section. Your username will be filled in the text box by default.

  • Finally click the “Submit changes” button at the bottom to save.

Note

The Django software foundation requests that anyone contributing more than a trivial change to Django sign and submit a Contributor License Agreement, this ensures that the Django Software Foundation has clear license to all contributions allowing for a clear license for all users.

Ticket claimers’ responsibility

Once you’ve claimed a ticket, you have a responsibility to work on that ticket in a reasonably timely fashion. If you don’t have time to work on it, either unclaim it or don’t claim it in the first place!

If there’s no sign of progress on a particular claimed ticket for a week or two, another developer may ask you to relinquish the ticket claim so that it’s no longer monopolized and somebody else can claim it.

If you’ve claimed a ticket and it’s taking a long time (days or weeks) to code, keep everybody updated by posting comments on the ticket. If you don’t provide regular updates, and you don’t respond to a request for a progress report, your claim on the ticket may be revoked.

As always, more communication is better than less communication!

Which tickets should be claimed?

Going through the steps of claiming tickets is overkill in some cases.

In the case of small changes, such as typos in the documentation or small bugs that will only take a few minutes to fix, you don’t need to jump through the hoops of claiming tickets. Submit your changes directly and you’re done!

It is always acceptable, regardless whether someone has claimed it or not, to link proposals to a ticket if you happen to have the changes ready.

Contribution style

Make sure that any contribution you do fulfills at least the following requirements:

  • The code required to fix a problem or add a feature is an essential part of a solution, but it is not the only part. A good fix should also include a regression test to validate the behavior that has been fixed and to prevent the problem from arising again. Also, if some tickets are relevant to the code that you’ve written, mention the ticket numbers in some comments in the test so that one can easily trace back the relevant discussions after your patch gets committed, and the tickets get closed.

  • If the code adds a new feature, or modifies the behavior of an existing feature, the change should also contain documentation.

When you think your work is ready to be reviewed, send a GitHub pull request. If you can’t send a pull request for some reason, you can also use patches in Trac. When using this style, follow these guidelines.

  • Submit patches in the format returned by the git diff command.

  • Attach patches to a ticket in the ticket tracker, using the “attach file” button. Please don’t put the patch in the ticket description or comment unless it’s a single line patch.

  • Name the patch file with a .diff extension; this will let the ticket tracker apply correct syntax highlighting, which is quite helpful.

Regardless of the way you submit your work, follow these steps.

  • Make sure your code fulfills the requirements in our contribution checklist.

  • Check the “Has patch” box on the ticket and make sure the “Needs documentation”, “Needs tests”, and “Patch needs improvement” boxes aren’t checked. This makes the ticket appear in the “Patches needing review” queue on the Development dashboard.

Contributions which require community feedback

A wider community discussion is required when a patch introduces new Django functionality and makes some sort of design decision. This is especially important if the approach involves a deprecation or introduces breaking changes.

The following are different approaches for gaining feedback from the community.

The Django Forum or django-developers mailing list

You can propose a change on the Django Forum or django-developers mailing list. You should explain the need for the change, go into details of the approach and discuss alternatives.

Please include a link to such discussions in your contributions.

Third party package

Django does not accept experimental features. All features must follow our deprecation policy. Hence, it can take months or years for Django to iterate on an API design.

If you need user feedback on a public interface, it is better to create a third-party package first. You can iterate on the public API much faster, while also validating the need for the feature.

Once this package becomes stable and there are clear benefits of incorporating aspects into Django core, starting a discussion on the Django Forum or django-developers mailing list would be the next step.

Django Enhancement Proposal (DEP)

Similar to Python’s PEPs, Django has Django Enhancement Proposals or DEPs. A DEP is a design document which provides information to the Django community, or describes a new feature or process for Django. They provide concise technical specifications of features, along with rationales. DEPs are also the primary mechanism for proposing and collecting community input on major new features.

Before considering writing a DEP, it is recommended to first open a discussion on the Django Forum or django-developers mailing list. This allows the community to provide feedback and helps refine the proposal. Once the DEP is ready the Steering Council votes on whether to accept it.

Some examples of DEPs that have been approved and fully implemented:

Deprecating a feature

There are a couple of reasons that code in Django might be deprecated:

  • If a feature has been improved or modified in a backwards-incompatible way, the old feature or behavior will be deprecated.

  • Sometimes Django will include a backport of a Python library that’s not included in a version of Python that Django currently supports. When Django no longer needs to support the older version of Python that doesn’t include the library, the library will be deprecated in Django.

As the deprecation policy describes, the first release of Django that deprecates a feature (A.B) should raise a RemovedInDjangoXXWarning (where XX is the Django version where the feature will be removed) when the deprecated feature is invoked. Assuming we have good test coverage, these warnings are converted to errors when running the test suite with warnings enabled: python -Wa runtests.py. Thus, when adding a RemovedInDjangoXXWarning you need to eliminate or silence any warnings generated when running the tests.

The first step is to remove any use of the deprecated behavior by Django itself. Next you can silence warnings in tests that actually test the deprecated behavior by using the ignore_warnings decorator, either at the test or class level:

  1. In a particular test:

    from django.test import ignore_warnings
from django.utils.deprecation import RemovedInDjangoXXWarning


@ignore_warnings(category=RemovedInDjangoXXWarning)
def test_foo(self): ...

  2. For an entire test case:

    from django.test import ignore_warnings
from django.utils.deprecation import RemovedInDjangoXXWarning


@ignore_warnings(category=RemovedInDjangoXXWarning)
class MyDeprecatedTests(unittest.TestCase): ...

You should also add a test for the deprecation warning:

from django.utils.deprecation import RemovedInDjangoXXWarning


def test_foo_deprecation_warning(self):
    msg = "Expected deprecation message"
    with self.assertWarnsMessage(RemovedInDjangoXXWarning, msg) as ctx:
        # invoke deprecated behavior
        ...
    self.assertEqual(ctx.filename, __file__)

It’s important to include a RemovedInDjangoXXWarning comment above code which has no warning reference, but will need to be changed or removed when the deprecation ends. This could include hooks which have been added to keep the previous behavior, or standalone items that are unnecessary or unused when the deprecation ends. For example:

import warnings
from django.utils.deprecation import RemovedInDjangoXXWarning


# RemovedInDjangoXXWarning.
def old_private_helper():
    # Helper function that is only used in foo().
    pass


def foo():
    warnings.warn(
        "foo() is deprecated.",
        category=RemovedInDjangoXXWarning,
        stacklevel=2,
    )
    old_private_helper()
    ...

Finally, there are a couple of updates to Django’s documentation to make:

  1. If the existing feature is documented, mark it deprecated in documentation using the .. deprecated:: A.B annotation. Include a short description and a note about the upgrade path if applicable.

  2. Add a description of the deprecated behavior, and the upgrade path if applicable, to the current release notes (docs/releases/A.B.txt) under the “Features deprecated in A.B” heading.

  3. Add an entry in the deprecation timeline (docs/internals/deprecation.txt) under the appropriate version describing what code will be removed.

Once you have completed these steps, you are finished with the deprecation. In each feature release, all RemovedInDjangoXXWarnings matching the new version are removed.

JavaScript contributions

For information on JavaScript contributions, see the JavaScript patches documentation.

Optimization patches

Patches aiming to deliver a performance improvement should provide benchmarks showing the before and after impact of the patch and sharing the commands for reviewers to reproduce.

django-asv benchmarks

django-asv monitors the performance of Django code over time. These benchmarks can be run on a pull request by labeling the pull request with benchmark. Adding to these benchmarks is highly encouraged.

Contribution checklist

Use this checklist to review a pull request. If you are reviewing a pull request that is not your own and it passes all the criteria below, please set the “Triage Stage” on the corresponding Trac ticket to “Ready for checkin”. If you’ve left comments for improvement on the pull request, please tick the appropriate flags on the Trac ticket based on the results of your review: “Patch needs improvement”, “Needs documentation”, and/or “Needs tests”. As time and interest permits, mergers do final reviews of “Ready for checkin” tickets and will either commit the changes or bump it back to “Accepted” if further work needs to be done. If you’re looking to become a merger, doing thorough reviews of contributions is a great way to earn trust.

Looking for a patch to review? Check out the “Patches needing review” section of the Django Development Dashboard.

Looking to get your pull request reviewed? Ensure the Trac flags on the ticket are set so that the ticket appears in that queue.

Documentation

  • Does the documentation build without any errors (make html, or make.bat html on Windows, from the docs directory)?

  • Does the documentation follow the writing style guidelines in Writing documentation?

  • Are there any spelling errors?

Bugs

  • Is there a proper regression test (the test should fail before the fix is applied)?

  • If it’s a bug that qualifies for a backport to the stable version of Django, is there a release note in docs/releases/A.B.C.txt? Bug fixes that will be applied only to the main branch don’t need a release note.

New Features

  • Are there tests to “exercise” all of the new code?

  • Is there a release note in docs/releases/A.B.txt?

  • Is there documentation for the feature and is it annotated appropriately with .. versionadded:: A.B or .. versionchanged:: A.B?

Deprecating a feature

See the Deprecating a feature guide.

All code changes

  • Does the coding style conform to our guidelines? Are there any black, blacken-docs, flake8, or isort errors? You can install the pre-commit hooks to automatically catch these errors.

  • If the change is backwards incompatible in any way, is there a note in the release notes (docs/releases/A.B.txt)?

  • Is Django’s test suite passing?

All tickets

Contributing code
Unit tests
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