Contributing#

Contributions are welcome! Whether it’s bug reports, feature requests, or pull requests — all help is appreciated.

Reporting issues#

Open an issue on the GitHub repository with a clear description of the problem and steps to reproduce it. Please:

In Navigation & Help, click on Print for debugging. Share this message along with your error.
If you have data loading problems, send some sample data to akseli.ilmanen@gmail.com, so I can test it myself.

Development installation#

To install ethograph in editable mode with all optional dependencies and development tools:

git clone https://github.com/Akseli-Ilmanen/ethograph
cd ethograph
uv pip install -e ".[gui,audio,dandi,dev,docs]"

See Installation for details on setting up a virtual environment and installing uv.

Setting up pre-commit hooks#

The project uses pre-commit to run ruff, mypy, check-manifest, and codespell automatically before every commit. Install the hooks once after cloning:

pre-commit install

After this, every git commit runs the checks locally — the same checks that run in CI. If any check fails, the commit is blocked and the errors are shown in the terminal.

To run the checks manually without committing:

pre-commit run --all-files

To auto-fix ruff issues:

ruff check --fix ethograph/
ruff format ethograph/