Contributing

Thank you for your interest in contributing! We welcome all contributions no matter their size. Please read along to learn how to get started. If you get stuck, feel free to ask for help in Ethereum Python Discord server.

Setting the stage

To get started, fork the repository to your own github account, then clone it to your development machine:

git clone git@github.com:your-github-username/eth-account.git

Next, install the development dependencies with uv. The dev dependency group is installed by default, so uv sync is enough for a local development environment.

cd eth-account
uv sync
uv run prek install

Running the tests

A great way to explore the code base is to run the tests.

We can then run the core tests with:

pytest tests/core

To run the integration test cases, we need to install node and the custom cli tool as follows:

# on Ubuntu
chmod +x ./tests/integration/js-scripts/setup_node_v22.sh
./tests/integration/js-scripts/setup_node_v22.sh  # As sudo
apt-get install -y nodejs  # As sudo
cd tests/integration/js-scripts
npm install

We can then run all tests with:

pytest tests

Code Style

We use prek to enforce a consistent code style across the library. This tool runs automatically with every commit, but you can also run it manually with:

make lint

If you need to make a commit that skips the prek checks, you can do so with git commit --no-verify.

This library uses type hints, which are enforced by the mypy tool (part of the prek checks). All new code is required to land with type hints, with the exception of code within the tests directory.

Documentation

Good documentation will lead to quicker adoption and happier users. Please check out our guide on how to create documentation for the Python Ethereum ecosystem.

Pull Requests

It’s a good idea to make pull requests early on. A pull request represents the start of a discussion, and doesn’t necessarily need to be the final, finished submission.

GitHub’s documentation for working on pull requests is available here.

Once you’ve made a pull request, take a look at the Circle CI build status in the GitHub interface and make sure all tests are passing. In general pull requests that do not pass the CI build yet won’t get reviewed unless explicitly requested.

If the pull request introduces changes that should be reflected in the release notes, please add a newsfragment file as explained here.

If possible, the change to the release notes file should be included in the commit that introduces the feature or bugfix.

Releasing

Releases are typically done from the main branch, except when releasing a beta (in which case the beta is released from main, and the previous stable branch is released from said branch).

Final review before each release

Before releasing a new version, run the test suite from the release branch:

git checkout main && git pull
uv run --group test pytest tests/core

Review the documentation that will get published:

uv run --group docs sphinx-apidoc -o docs/ . "conftest*" "tests" "tests/*"
uv run --group docs sphinx-build -W -b html docs docs/_build/html
uv run --group docs sphinx-build -W -b doctest docs docs/_build/doctest

Publish a release

After confirming that the release package looks okay, create a GitHub Release for the version being published. The release tag is the canonical version source: setuptools-scm derives the package version from that tag, and the release workflow builds and publishes the package to PyPI using trusted publishing.

Release notes are maintained through GitHub Releases.