Contributing

Thank you for your interest! Sanic is always looking for contributors. If you don’t feel comfortable contributing code, adding docstrings to the source files is very appreciated.

Installation

To develop on sanic (and mainly to just run the tests) it is highly recommend to install from sources.

So assume you have already cloned the repo and are in the working directory with a virtual environment already set up, then run:

pip3 install -e '.[dev]'

Dependency Changes

Sanic doesn’t use requirements*.txt files to manage any kind of dependencies related to it in order to simplify the effort required in managing the dependencies. Please make sure you have read and understood the following section of the document that explains the way sanic manages dependencies inside the setup.py file.

Dependency Type	Usage	Installation
requirements	Bare minimum dependencies required for sanic to function	pip3 install -e .
tests_require / extras_require[‘test’]	Dependencies required to run the Unit Tests for sanic	pip3 install -e '.[test]'
extras_require[‘dev’]	Additional Development requirements to add for contributing	pip3 install -e '.[dev]'
extras_require[‘docs’]	Dependencies required to enable building and enhancing sanic documentation	pip3 install -e '.[docs]'

Running tests

To run the tests for sanic it is recommended to use tox like so:

tox

See it’s that simple!

Pull requests!

So the pull request approval rules are pretty simple:

• All pull requests must pass unit tests

• All pull requests must be reviewed and approved by at least one current collaborator on the project

• All pull requests must pass flake8 checks

• If you decide to remove/change anything from any common interface a deprecation message should accompany it.

• If you implement a new feature you should have at least one unit test to accompany it.

Documentation

Sanic’s documentation is built using sphinx. Guides are written in Markdown and can be found in the docs folder, while the module reference is automatically generated using sphinx-apidoc.

To generate the documentation from scratch:

sphinx-apidoc -fo docs/_api/ sanic
sphinx-build -b html docs docs/_build

The HTML documentation will be created in the docs/_build folder.

Warning

One of the main goals of Sanic is speed. Code that lowers the performance of Sanic without significant gains in usability, security, or features may not be merged. Please don’t let this intimidate you! If you have any concerns about an idea, open an issue for discussion and help.