Maintaining Your Sanity While Maintaining Your Open Source App

Mark Lavin

Packaging

• Use pip
• PEP 386
• List a description and __version__ number in __init__.py

Anti-Patterns

• giant README
• Docs which aren’t available online
• Use Sphinx and RTD
• Create docs before you think you need them

Things to Document

• Description of the project and its goals
• How to install, including requirements
• How to configure
• Release notes (not svn/git/hg logs)

Test Only Models

• Define models in tests.py and they’re only available to the test runner (already used by Django)

Testing

• Tox uses virtualenv to run a test matrix * different Python versions * different Django versions * different DB backends
• You can have Tox build your Sphinx docs
• sul