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Contributing to the App

The project is packaged with a light development environment based on docker-compose to help with the local development of the project and to run tests.

The project is following Network to Code software development guidelines and is leveraging the following:

  • Black, Pylint, Bandit, flake8, yamllint, and pydocstyle for Python linting and formatting.
  • Django unit test to ensure the plugin is working properly.

Documentation is built using mkdocs. The Docker based development environment automatically starts a container hosting a live version of the documentation website on http://localhost:8001 that auto-refreshes when you make any changes to your local files.

Branching Policy

The branching policy includes the following tenets:

  • The develop branch is the branch for bug fixes.
  • The next branch is the branch for new features.
  • The stable-<major>.<minor> branch is the branch of the latest version within that major/minor version.
  • The stable-<major>.<minor> branch will have all of the latest bug fixes and security patches, and may or may not represent the released version.
  • PRs intended to add new features should be branched from and merged to the next branch.
  • PRs intended to add new features that break backward compatibility should be discussed before a PR is created.
  • PRs intended to address bug fixes and security patches should be branched from and merged to the develop branch.

Nautobot Golden Config will observe semantic versioning, as of 1.0. This may result in an quick turn around in minor versions to keep pace with an ever growing feature set.

Release Policy

Nautobot Golden Config has currently no intended scheduled release schedule, and will release new features in minor versions.

When a new release of any kind (e.g. from develop to main, or a release of a stable-<major>.<minor>) is created the following should happen.

  • A release PR is created:
    • Add and/or update to the changelog in docs/admin/release_notes/version_<major>.<minor>.md file to reflect the changes.
    • Update the mkdocs.yml file to include updates when adding a new release_notes version file.
    • Change the version from <major>.<minor>.<patch>-beta to <major>.<minor>.<patch> in pyproject.toml.
    • Set the PR to the proper branch, e.g. either main or stable-<major>.<minor>.
  • Ensure the tests for the PR pass.
  • Merge the PR.
  • Create a new tag:
    • The tag should be in the form of v<major>.<minor>.<patch>.
    • The title should be in the form of v<major>.<minor>.<patch>.
    • The description should be the changes that were added to the version_<major>.<minor>.md document.
  • If merged into main, then push from main to develop, in order to retain the merge commit created when the PR was merged.
  • If the is a new <major>.<minor>, create a stable-<major>.<minor> for the previous version, so that security updates to old versions may be applied more easily.
  • A post release PR is created:
    • Change the version from <major>.<minor>.<patch> to <major>.<minor>.<patch + 1>-beta in pyproject.toml.
    • Set the PR to the proper branch, e.g. either develop or stable-<major>.<minor>.
    • Once tests pass, merge.