Contributing

Contributions are welcome and appreciated! Every little bit helps, and credit will always be given. There are plenty of ways to get involved besides writing code. We’ve listed a few options below.

Ways to Contribute

Write a scraper

Don’t see a scraper for your state or county? We’d love to have you write a scraper to help us expand coverage!

Our Writing a scraper page is the best place to get started. It’s also a good idea to file a new ticket for the work on our Issue tracker, or claim the ticket if one already exists. We’re happy to talk through strategies for scraping and integration with the framework, so please do reach out!

Report Bugs

Report bugs on our Issue tracker.

If you are reporting a bug, please include:

  • Your operating system name and version.

  • Any details about your local setup that might be helpful in troubleshooting.

  • Detailed steps to reproduce the bug.

Fix Bugs

Look through the GitHub Issue tracker for bugs. Anything tagged with “bug” and “help wanted” is open to whoever wants to implement it.

Do Research

This project involves a fair bit of research, especially with respect to locating platforms and sites to scrape. Research jobs are great ways to get involved if you don’t write code but still want to pitch in. Anything tagged with the “research” and “help wanted” labels on GitHub is fair game.

Write Documentation

We could always use more documentation, whether as part of the official court-scraper docs, in docstrings, or even on the web in blog posts, articles, and such. Our official docs use Markdown and Sphinx. You can find the files in the repository’s docs folder.

Get Started!

Ready to contribute? Check out our docs on Writing a scraper and Testing, and see below steps on setting up court-scraper for local development.

  1. Fork the court-scraper repo on GitHub.

  2. Clone your fork locally:

$ git clone git@github.com:your_name_here/court-scraper.git

  1. Set up a local virtual environment and install dev dependencies for local development with Pipenv:

cd court-scraper/
pipenv install --dev

  1. Create a branch for local development:

$ git checkout -b name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature

Now you can make your changes locally.

  1. When you’re done making changes, check that your changes pass flake8 and the tests, including testing other Python versions with tox:

# Lint and test for current Python version
make test
make lint
# If you're working on documentation, you can build and preview the docs with
make docs
make servedocs

  1. Commit your changes and push your branch to GitHub:

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Your detailed description of your changes."
$ git push origin name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature

  1. Submit a pull request through the GitHub website.

Pull Request Guidelines

Before you submit a pull request, check that it meets these guidelines:

  1. The pull request should include tests.

  2. If the pull request adds functionality, please be sure to review the docs and include necessary updates. For example, new classes, methods and functions should be documented.

  3. The pull request should work for Python version 3.6 or higher. Check the Actions tab on GitHub and make sure that the tests pass for all supported Python versions.