Welcome to PySR's contributing guide

Thank you for investing your time in contributing to our project! Any contribution you make will be reflected on the contributors lists: frontend and backend :sparkles:.

In this guide you will get an overview of the contribution workflow from opening an issue, creating a PR, reviewing, and merging the PR.

New contributor guide

To get an overview of the project, read PySR's README. The PySR docs give additional information. Here are some resources to help you get started with open source contributions in general:

Issues

Create a new issue

If you spot a problem with PySR, search if an issue already exists. If a related issue doesn't exist, you can open a new issue using a relevant issue form.

Solve an issue

Scan through our existing issues to find one that interests you (feel free to work on any!). You can narrow down the search using labels as filters. See Labels for more information. If you find an issue to work on, you are welcome to open a PR with a fix.

Make Changes

Make changes locally

Fork the repository.

Using GitHub Desktop:
- Getting started with GitHub Desktop will guide you through setting up Desktop.
- Once Desktop is set up, you can use it to fork the repo!
Using the command line:
- Fork the repo so that you can make your changes without affecting the original project until you're ready to merge them.

Create a working branch and start with your changes!
(Optional) If you would like to make changes to PySR itself, skip to step 4. However, if you are interested in making changes to the symbolic regression code itself, check out the guide on modifying a custom SymbolicRegression.jl library. In this case, you might instead be interested in making suggestions to the SymbolicRegression.jl library.
You can install your local version of PySR with python setup.py install, and run tests with python -m pysr.test main.

Commit your update

Once you are happy with your changes, run black . to apply Black formatting to your local version. Commit the changes once you are ready.

Pull Request

When you're finished with the changes, create a pull request, also known as a PR.

Don't forget to link PR to issue if you are solving one.
Enable the checkbox to allow maintainer edits so the branch can be updated for a merge. Once you submit your PR, a PySR team member will review your proposal. We may ask questions or request additional information.
We may ask for changes to be made before a PR can be merged, either using suggested changes or pull request comments. You can apply suggested changes directly through the UI. You can make any other changes in your fork, then commit them to your branch.
As you update your PR and apply changes, mark each conversation as resolved.
If you run into any merge issues, checkout this git tutorial to help you resolve merge conflicts and other issues.

Your PR is merged!

Congratulations :tada::tada: The PySR team thanks you :sparkles:.

Once your PR is merged, your contributions will be publicly visible.

Thanks for being part of the PySR community!