Shopify Python Standards

This repository describes Python development standards at Shopify, and provides some utilities to assist other Python repositories adhere to these standards.

Development Principles

• Make sure your code is readable.
• Don't hesitate to refactor code where it improves the design.
• Don't take shortcuts; development is more like a marathon than a sprint.
• And leave the code cleaner than you found it.

Python Style

Shopify follows the Google Python Style Guide with the following exceptions:

• Line Length: The maximum line length is 120 columns.
• Private Methods and Properties
  • Prefix class-private members and properties with double underscores. This invokes name-mangling, which provides some protection against violations of encapsulation.
  • Prefix module-private functions and variables with a single underscore.
• Multi-line docstrings: The first line of text (summary line) appears on the same line as the opening three double-quotes.
• Base Class Inheritance
  • If a class or nested class inherits from no other base classes, explicitly inherit from object.
  • This won't be enforced for our pure Python 3 code, but we will enforce for Python 2 and 2/3 compatible code.
• Variable/module-name collisions: Variable names may be suffixed with an underscore to avoid collisions with imported modules (an extension of the PEP-8 convention for collisions with builtins).

Versioning

Projects that are producing libraries to be used in other projects should choose their release version numbers using Semantic Versioning 2.0.0, i.e.

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes, MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.

Additional labels for pre-release and build metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.

Testing

All committed code requires quality tests that provide ample code coverage. Functionality that is not covered by tests should be assumed to be broken (and probably will be).

Code Review

Committing to master requires a code review, submitted in the form of a GitHub Pull Request. To be merged, a PR must have an explicit approval from a core team member and no outstanding questions.

Project Setup

To help you apply these principles this repository contains a pylint plugin and some example files to bootstrap a Python project. When beginning a Python project:

• Start with a pylintrc file of this form and disable messages in Python source files if needed as agreed upon by team members
  • During early development of a project, globally disabling the fixme and missing-docstring messages via pylintrc is acceptable but these should be removed before a 1.0.0 release of a library or a production deployment of an application
  • Install and use the shopify_python checker (which this pylintrc is configured to run) by making a requirements.txt entry of git+https://github.com/Shopify/shopify_python.git@v0.1.2 (replacing v0.1.2 with the latest version number) and installing it via pip (e.g. pip install -r requirements.txt)
• Use a continuous integration (CI) server such as Travis CI (or an internal alternative) and for each PR require successful runs of:
  • py.test to run your unit tests
    • Use the pytest-randomly plugin to randomize test order to eliminate test-order dependencies
  • pylint to lint your code using pylint's default checkers and the shopify_python checker defined in this project
  • mypy to check type annotations
• Use a Makefile similar to the one used by this project to run tests/linters in a similar way on both CI and for local development (or use an internal alternative)

Contributing

Please refer to our Contribution Guidelines