Contributing

To contribute to dbt-contracts, follow these steps:

Setup your development environment

1. Ensure you have Python 3.12 or greater and uv installed on your system.

2. Go to the GitHub repository and fork the project by clicking Fork in the top left:

   

3. Go to the page of your GitHub account’s fork of dbt-contracts and clone the repository:

   

4. In a terminal, navigate to the directory of the cloned project and install the package along with all of its development dependencies into a virtual environment:

   make install
   

5. Optionally, to ensure inheritance diagrams in the documentation render correctly, install graphviz. See here for platform-specific info on how to install graphviz.

Development commands

The Makefile (or make.bat on Windows) provides the following commands for validating your changes. Each runs through uv, so there is no need to activate the virtual environment first.

Command	Description
make install	Install the package with all dependency groups.
make test	Run the tests.
make lint	Check the code with ruff.
make lint-fix	Check the code with ruff and automatically fix what it can.
make docs	Build the HTML documentation to docs/_build/html, failing on any warnings.
make check	Run lint, test and docs i.e. everything CI validates. Run this before opening a pull request.
make rebuild-html	Clean and rebuild the HTML documentation from scratch, then check all of its links.

Run make help to list these commands along with the other Sphinx documentation targets.

Making changes and testing

Create a new branch in your local git project and commit changes to this branch as you develop.

All tests are located within ./tests. If you make any changes to the functionality of the package, you must either modify or add new tests for these changes. To run all tests, or just the tests in a given file:

make test
# OR
uv run pytest path/to/test/file.py

As part of code validation, your code will be required to pass certain linting checks. This project uses ruff to help give an indication as to the quality of your code. For the current checks that your code will be expected to pass, please check the [tool.ruff] config in the pyproject.toml file in the root of the project.

To run these checks locally, and optionally fix what can be fixed automatically, run:

make lint
# OR
make lint-fix

If you change the documentation or any docstrings, check the documentation still builds without warnings:

make docs

Submitting your changes for review

1. Ensure everything CI validates passes locally first by running make check.

2. Add any changes you made to the Release History.

3. Go to your forked repository and open a pull request for your branch.

   

4. Add a title, a motivation for your changes, and the changes you have made. This can just be a copy-paste from your release history notes.

   

5. Wait for a review and make any necessary changes.

6. Have your changes committed 🎉