The Python special interest group (SIG) meets regularly. See the OpenTelemetry community repo for information on this and other language SIGs.
See the public meeting notes for a summary description of past meetings. To request edit access, join the meeting or get in touch on Slack.
See to the community membership document on how to become a Member, Approver and Maintainer.
This is the main repo for OpenTelemetry Python. Nevertheless, there are other repos that are related to this project. Please take a look at this list first, your contributions may belong in one of these repos better:
- OpenTelemetry Contrib: Instrumentations for third-party
libraries and frameworks. There is an ongoing effort to migrate into the OpenTelemetry Contrib repo some of the existing
programmatic instrumentations that are now in the
ext
directory in the main OpenTelemetry repo. Please ask in the Slack channel (see below) for guidance if you want to contribute with these instrumentations.
The default branch for this repo is main
. Changes that pertain to metrics
go into the metrics
branch. Any changes that pertain to components marked as stable
in the specifications or anything that is not metrics
related go into this branch.
If you are looking for someone to help you find a starting point and be a resource for your first contribution, join our Slack and find a buddy!
- Join Slack and join our channel.
- Post in the room with an introduction to yourself, what area you are interested in (check issues marked "Help Wanted"), and say you are looking for a buddy. We will match you with someone who has experience in that area.
The Slack channel will be used for introductions and an entry point for external people to be triaged and redirected. For discussions, please open up an issue or a Github Discussion.
Your OpenTelemetry buddy is your resource to talk to directly on all aspects of contributing to OpenTelemetry: providing context, reviewing PRs, and helping those get merged. Buddies will not be available 24/7, but is committed to responding during their normal contribution hours.
To quickly get up and running, you can use the scripts/eachdist.py
tool that
ships with this project. First create a virtualenv and activate it.
Then run python scripts/eachdist.py develop
to install all required packages
as well as the project's packages themselves (in --editable
mode).
You can then run scripts/eachdist.py test
to test everything or
scripts/eachdist.py lint
to lint everything (fixing anything that is auto-fixable).
Additionally, this project uses tox to automate
some aspects of development, including testing against multiple Python versions.
To install tox
, run:
$ pip install tox
You can run tox
with the following arguments:
tox
to run all existing tox commands, including unit tests for all packages under multiple Python versionstox -e docs
to regenerate the API docstox -e opentelemetry-api
andtox -e opentelemetry-sdk
to run the API and SDK unit teststox -e py37-opentelemetry-api
to e.g. run the API unit tests under a specific Python versiontox -e lint
to run lint checks on all code
black
and isort
are executed when tox -e lint
is run. The reported errors can be tedious to fix manually.
An easier way to do so is:
- Run
.tox/lint/bin/black .
- Run
.tox/lint/bin/isort .
We try to keep the amount of public symbols in our code minimal. A public symbol is any Python identifier that does not start with an underscore. Every public symbol is something that has to be kept in order to maintain backwards compatibility, so we try to have as few as possible.
To check if your PR is adding public symbols, run tox -e public-symbols-check
. This will always fail if public symbols are being added. The idea
behind this is that every PR that adds public symbols fails in CI, forcing reviewers to check the symbols to make sure they are strictly necessary.
If after checking them, it is considered that they are indeed necessary, the PR will be labeled with Skip Public API check
so that this check is not
run.
See
tox.ini
for more detail on available tox commands.
Some of the tox
targets install packages from the OpenTelemetry Python Contrib Repository via
pip. The version of the packages installed defaults to the main
branch in that repository when tox
is run locally. It is possible to install packages tagged
with a specific git commit hash by setting an environment variable before running tox as per the following example:
CONTRIB_REPO_SHA=dde62cebffe519c35875af6d06fae053b3be65ec tox
The continuation integration overrides that environment variable with as per the configuration here.
Performance progression of benchmarks for packages distributed by OpenTelemetry Python can be viewed as a graph of throughput vs commit history. From the linked page, you can download a JSON file with the performance results.
Running the tox
tests also runs the performance tests if any are available. Benchmarking tests are done with pytest-benchmark
and they output a table with results to the console.
To write benchmarks, simply use the pytest benchmark fixture like the following:
def test_simple_start_span(benchmark):
def benchmark_start_as_current_span(span_name, attribute_num):
span = tracer.start_span(
span_name,
attributes={"count": attribute_num},
)
span.end()
benchmark(benchmark_start_as_current_span, "benchmarkedSpan", 42)
Make sure the test file is under the tests/performance/benchmarks/
folder of
the package it is benchmarking and further has a path that corresponds to the
file in the package it is testing. Make sure that the file name begins with
test_benchmark_
. (e.g. opentelemetry-sdk/tests/performance/benchmarks/trace/propagation/test_benchmark_b3_format.py
)
Everyone is welcome to contribute code to opentelemetry-python
via GitHub
pull requests (PRs).
To create a new PR, fork the project in GitHub and clone the upstream repo:
$ git clone https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-python.git
Add your fork as an origin:
$ git remote add fork https://github.com/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/opentelemetry-python.git
Run tests:
# make sure you have all supported versions of Python installed
$ pip install tox # only first time.
$ tox # execute in the root of the repository
Check out a new branch, make modifications and push the branch to your fork:
$ git checkout -b feature
# edit files
$ git commit
$ git push fork feature
Open a pull request against the main opentelemetry-python
repo.
Pull requests are also tested for their compatibility with packages distributed by OpenTelemetry in the OpenTelemetry Python Contrib Repository.
If a pull request (PR) introduces a change that would break the compatibility of these packages with the Core packages in this repo, a separate PR should be opened in the Contrib repo with changes to make the packages compatible.
Follow these steps:
- Open Core repo PR (Contrib Tests will fail)
- Open Contrib repo PR and modify its
CORE_REPO_SHA
in.github/workflows/test.yml
to equal the commit SHA of the Core repo PR to pass tests - Modify the Core repo PR
CONTRIB_REPO_SHA
in.github/workflows/test.yml
to equal the commit SHA of the Contrib repo PR to pass Contrib repo tests (a sanity check for the Maintainers & Approvers) - Merge the Contrib repo
- Restore the Core repo PR
CONTRIB_REPO_SHA
to point tomain
- Merge the Core repo PR
- If the PR is not ready for review, please put
[WIP]
in the title, tag it aswork-in-progress
, or mark it asdraft
. - Make sure CLA is signed and CI is clear.
A PR is considered to be ready to merge when:
- It has received two approvals from Approvers / Maintainers (at different companies).
- Major feedbacks are resolved.
- All tests are passing, including Contrib Repo tests which may require updating the GitHub workflow to reference a PR in the Contrib repo
- It has been open for review for at least one working day. This gives people reasonable time to review.
- Trivial change (typo, cosmetic, doc, etc.) doesn't have to wait for one day.
- Urgent fix can take exception as long as it has been actively communicated.
Any Approver / Maintainer can merge the PR once it is ready to merge.
As with other OpenTelemetry clients, opentelemetry-python follows the opentelemetry-specification.
It's especially valuable to read through the library guidelines.
OpenTelemetry is an evolving specification, one where the desires and use cases are clear, but the method to satisfy those uses cases are not.
As such, contributions should provide functionality and behavior that conforms to the specification, but the interface and structure is flexible.
It is preferable to have contributions follow the idioms of the language rather than conform to specific API names or argument patterns in the spec.
For a deeper discussion, see: open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#165
If you are adding a component that introduces new OpenTelemetry environment variables, put them all in a module,
as it is done in opentelemetry.environment_variables
or in opentelemetry.sdk.environment_variables
.
Keep in mind that any new environment variable must be declared in all caps and must start with OTEL_PYTHON_
.
Register this module with the opentelemetry_environment_variables
entry point to make your environment variables
automatically load as options for the opentelemetry-instrument
command.
- docstrings should adhere to the Google Python Style Guide as specified with the napolean extension extension in Sphinx.