docs/contributing.md

Contributing Guide

We welcome contributions to ARIA! Please follow these guidelines to set up your environment, write tests, and submit pull requests.

Development Workflow

1. Format & Style Checks: Ruff is used for linting and formatting. Run the following checks before committing code:

   ruff check .
   ruff format --check .
   

2. Format Code Automatically:

   ruff format .
   ruff check --fix .
   

3. Running the Test Suite: Run the full pytest suite to verify you did not introduce regressions:

   pytest tests/ -v
   

   Always target pytest tests/ explicitly — running bare pytest from the root will traverse data/ and fail on import errors from cloned repositories.

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Coding Standards

• Backward Compatibility: Ensure 100% backward compatibility. Do not modify existing API routers or payload schemas.
• Centralized Configuration: Fetch all environment variables via backend/settings.settings. Do not write direct os.environ.get() calls in business logic.
• Logging: Use standard loggers logging.getLogger(__name__). Do not use print() statements for diagnostic messages.
• Middlewares: Make sure new HTTP features are implemented as modular Starlette/FastAPI middlewares where possible.