Contributing¶

Contributions are welcome, and they are greatly appreciated! Every little bit helps, and credit will always be given.

Report Bugs¶

Report bugs at https://github.com/copier-org/copier/issues.

If you are reporting a bug, please include:

Your operating system name and version.
Any details about your local setup that might be helpful in troubleshooting.
Detailed steps to reproduce the bug.

Fix Bugs¶

Look through the GitHub issues for bugs. Anything tagged with "bug" is open to whoever wants to implement it.

Implement Features¶

Look through the GitHub issues for features. Anything tagged with "Feature request" is open to whoever wants to implement it.

Write Documentation¶

The project could always use more documentation, whether as part of the official project docs, or even on the web in blog posts, articles, and such.

Submit Feedback¶

The best way to send feedback is to file an issue at https://github.com/copier-org/copier/issues.

If you are proposing a feature:

Explain in detail how it would work.
Keep the scope as narrow as possible, to make it easier to implement.
Remember that this is a volunteer-driven project, and that contributions are welcome. :)

Discuss¶

Feel free to discuss with our community through our discussions channel. Be polite!

Dev Environment Setup¶

The recommended way is:

Click on
Wait until the terminal that pops up is ready.
Accept the direnv pop-ups that appear.

For local development with a similar experience, we also offer a VS Code dev container integration.

For local or more complex setups, continue reading.

We use some tools as part of our development workflow which you'll need to install into your host environment:

Devbox to provide a reproducible development environment.
Direnv to load that environment automatically in your shell.

Without Devbox/Nix¶

For some reasons you might want to avoid installing Devbox/Nix in your system. Maybe you don't have enough permissions, you work on Windows, or you just don't want to add yet another package manager to your system. We believe Devbox/Nix is awesome enough so as to be the default tool for almost any developer, but we respect your choice.

You can use standard Python tooling such as uv and a valid Python installation installed in an imperative manner of your choice, e.g. using uv as well.

However, you won't be able to auto-lint or auto-format code without Devbox/Nix. If you don't have Nix installed but you have Docker or Podman, you can run poe lint and get similar results. It will use a container to install Nix, and Nix to install the formatters.

If you still don't have Docker or Podman, don't worry. You can push your changes without formatting. As long as you give Copier maintainers permissions to change your PR, a bot will kindly auto-format code for you and push it back to your branch.

Get Started¶

Ready to contribute? Here's how to set up the project for local development.

Fork the Copier repo on GitHub.

Clone your fork locally:

git clone git@github.com:my-user/copier.git
cd copier

Use Direnv (or Devbox directly) to set up a development environment:
```
# Let direnv do its magic ...
direnv allow

# ... or use Devbox directly
devbox shell
```
This process will take some time to load for the 1st time. It will download all development dependencies, including uv, and it will use it to create a virtualenv and install Copier with all its development dependencies too.
Create a branch for local development:
```
git checkout -b name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature
```
Now you can make your changes locally.
When you're done making changes, check that your changes pass all tests:
```
uv run poe test
uv run poe lint
```
Note

If you get fails due to pexpect.exceptions.TIMEOUT: <pexpect.popen_spawn.PopenSpawn object at 0x............>, you can adjust the timeout to a longer one (default: 10), or remove the timeout (0). Either add it as an argument in your command:
```
uv run poe test --spawn-timeout 0
```
Or modify pytest arguments in VS Code workspace settings:
.vscode/settings.json
```
{
  ...
  "python.testing.pytestArgs": [
    "--spawn-timeout=0"
  ]
}
```

Optionally, use pyclean to remove Python bytecode and build artifacts, e.g.

uvx pyclean . --debris --verbose

or

pipx run pyclean . --debris --verbose

Commit your changes and push your branch to GitHub:

git add .
cz commit  # use `git commit` if you prefer, but this helps
git push origin name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature

Submit a pull request through the GitHub website.

Pull Request Guidelines¶

Before you submit a pull request, check that it meets these guidelines:

The pull request has code, it should include tests.
Check that all checks pass on GitHub CI.
If something significant changed, modify docs.

Commit message guidelines¶

Follow Conventional Commits standard.

We use Commitizen to handle Copier releases. This tool generates the appropriate tag based on that standard. It also writes our changelog. Changes that are included there are of type fix, feat and refactor; also BREAKING CHANGE: trailers will appear. If your change is not meaningful in the changelog, then please don't use one of those categories.

Maintainer notes¶

If you're a maintainer and you want to merge a PR that will produce a confusing changelog, then please squash the PR on merge, and change the commit message to make it meaningful. Remember to respect co-autorship when squashing, especially if multiple authors were involved.

If the last commit is pushed back by github-actions[bot] and named style: autoformat with pre-commit, it's most likely an automatic reformatting commit done by the CI. Those kind of commits cannot trigger other workflows. Thus, to be able to re-run CI, close and reopen the PR. Consider squashing on merge if possible and practical.

Tips¶

To run a subset of tests:

uv run poe test tests/the-tests-file.py

How to create a new release¶

This section is for maintainers. Since we use the conventional commits standard, the easiest way to create a new release is to open Copier repo locally and run:

# Make sure you're in the last commit
git checkout master
git pull --tags

# Create a new changelog entry and bump the version automatically
cz bump --retry

# Push it
git push --tags

Now the tag is released, but GitHub won't display it in the releases page. For that:

Draft a new release.
Choose the tag you just pushed.
Set the tag also as release title.
Copy the just added changelog entry from CHANGELOG and paste it as a description.
Enable "Set as the latest release".
Optionally, enable "Create a discussion for this release".
Click on "Publish release".