Contributing to PaperQA

Thank you for your interest in contributing to PaperQA! Here are some guidelines to help you get started.

Setting up the development environment

We use uv for our local development.

1. Install uv by following the instructions on the uv website.

2. Run the following command to install all dependencies and set up the development environment:

   uv sync

Installing the package for development

If you prefer to use pip for installing the package in development mode, you can do so by running:

pip install -e ".[dev]"

Where the dev extra includes development dependencies such as pytest.

Running tests and other tooling

Use the following commands:

• Run tests (requires an OpenAI key in your environment)

  pytest
  # or for multiprocessing based parallelism
  pytest -n auto

• Run pre-commit for formatting and type checking

  pre-commit run --all-files

• Run mypy, refurb, or pylint directly:

  mypy paperqa
  # or
  refurb paperqa
  # or
  pylint paperqa

See our GitHub Actions tests.yml for further reference.

Using pytest-recording and VCR cassettes

We use the pytest-recording plugin to create VCR cassettes to cache HTTP requests, making our unit tests more deterministic.

To record a new VCR cassette:

uv run pytest --record-mode=once tests/desired_test_module.py

And the new cassette(s) should appear in tests/cassettes.

Our configuration for pytest-recording can be found in tests/conftest.py. This includes header removals (e.g. OpenAI authorization key) from responses to ensure sensitive information is excluded from the cassettes.

Please ensure cassettes are less than 1 MB to keep tests loading quickly.

Happy coding!