How to contribute to the OMFIT project

There are many ways to contribute to OMFIT, which include:

1. Using OMFIT for your research

2. Submitting issues and bug reports

3. Suggesting and discussing ideas

4. Developing code

5. Providing documentation and tutorials

6. Engaging with the broader plasma community and promoting the use of OMFIT

To this end, remember that citing OMFIT in papers, talks, and posters helps increase the visibility of the project and is yet another important way to contribute to OMFIT.

Contributing to the OMFIT source code

Contributing to the OMFIT source code requires having access to the OMFIT-source GitHub repository.

• A tutorial for contributing to OMFIT using git directly (framework, classes, and physics modules) can be found here: (Google docs, PDF)

• Contributions to the physics modules can be done directly from within the OMFIT GUI (Google docs, PDF)

Develop new modules

• A guide for developing a module or personal project can be found (Google docs, PDF <Google docs)

• Follow this video tutorial for step by step development of a new module.

Development Model

OMFIT relies on ``git` for version control. <git_OMFIT>` The inspiration for the OMFIT development model is found here.

There are two main git branches which exist indefinitely on the OMFIT-source GitHub repository:

• The master branch exists to hold the ‘stable’ version of OMFIT

• The unstable branch is the place where new features and bugfixes come together

Features are first implemented in the unstable branch then are moved to the master branch. Most users should be running on the master branch, and use the unstable branch only upon request of the developers to test some specific feature(s). Each master release is completed with release notes that summarize the main progress since the past release.

Updating OMFIT’s environment

OMFIT relies on a number of external packages and applications. Should a developer need to add to this list or change package requirements such as minimum version number the developer should:

1. Edit OMFIT-source/install/omfit_dependencies.yaml. Follow the pattern in the yaml file for adding a new dependency. To cover the OMFIT install base, an entry should be made for both Conda and pip.

2. In the same file, make sure to increment the last part of the version number at the top of the file. (So 3.0.9 would go to 3.0.10 for example)

3. (Optional) Run OMFIT-source/install/generate_install_files.py to regenerate the package files for different installers.

4. Commit the change to the branch omfit_env_test. This is a special branch that will do test builds of potential new OMFIT environments.

Should the tests complete successfully, the environment changes can be merged into unstable after which the newly built Conda packages and Docker images will be uploaded for distribution.