Contributing to IMAPClient¶
The best way to contribute changes to IMAPClient is to fork the official repository on Github, make changes in a branch in your personal fork and then submit a pull request.
Discussion on Github before undertaking development is highly encouraged for potentially major changes.
Although not essential, it will make the project maintainers much happier if change submissions include appropriate updates to unit tests, live tests and documentation. Please ask if you’re unsure how of how the tests work.
Please read on if you plan on submitting changes to IMAPClient.
Source Code¶
The official source code repository for IMAPClient can be found on Github at: https://github.com/mjs/imapclient
Any major feature work will also be found as branches of this repository.
Branches¶
Development for the next major release happens on the master branch.
There is also a branch for each major release series (for example:
1.x). When appropriate and when there will be future releases for
a series, changes may be selectively merged between master and a
stable release branch.
Unit Tests¶
Running Unit Tests¶
To run the tests, from the root of the package source run:
uv run python -m unittest --verbose
Testing Against Multiple Python Versions¶
When submitting a Pull Request to IMAPClient, tests are automatically run against all the supported Python versions.
It is possible to run these tests locally using uv, which will transparently download and manage any Python versions it doesn’t already have available. For example, to run the unit tests against Python 3.10:
uv run --python 3.10 python -m unittest --verbose
Repeat this for each of the Python versions officially supported by
IMAPClient (see .github/workflows/main.yml for the current list) to
test against all of them.
Writing Unit Tests¶
Protocol level unit tests should not act against a real IMAP server but should use canned data instead. The IMAPClientTest base class should typically be used as the base class for any tests - it provides a mock IMAPClient instance at self.client. See the tests in tests/test_imapclient.py for examples of how to write unit tests using this approach.
Documentation¶
The source for the project’s documentation can be found under doc/src in the source distribution.
In order to build the documentation you’ll need Sphinx installed.
Running uv sync from the root of the project source will install
Sphinx along with the other development dependencies.
Once the dependencies are installed, the documentation can be rebuilt using:
uv run sphinx-build doc/src doc/build