Code & Data Guidelines

The is a hub for discussions and best practices on code management! The goal is someone can fork/clone this template repo and start a new project easily. This was written by Mackenzie Mathis, and I thank my lab and the open-source community for many lessons learned.

Overview

This repository is a work-in-progress template for structuring coding projects with clean, reproducible, and collaborative workflows. It includes tools and practices that streamline development, documentation, testing, and deployment.

Core Components

1. Code Organization

   • Make a clear folder structure for modules, tests, and configs; try to keep this across project/s

   • Naming conventions and modular design principles, here are useful standards to consider.

Recommended Directory Structure

project_name/
├── README.md
├── LICENSE
├── pyproject.toml
├── setup.cfg
├── .gitignore
├── .pre-commit-config.yaml
├── _toc.yml
├── docker/
│   └── Dockerfile
├── examples/
│   └── basic_usage.ipynb
├── placeholder (project_name)/   # Main package code
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── module_example.py
    ├── version.py
│   └── utils/
│       └── helpers.py
├── tests/
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── test_module1.py
│   └── conftest.py
├── docs/             # JupyterBook documentation
│   ├── _config.yml
│   └── index.md
└── .github/
    └── workflows/
        └── codespell.yml
        └── publish-book.yml

2. Documentation

   • JupyterBook setup for comprehensive, interactive project documentation!

   • Here are guidelines for writing readable and maintainable docstrings - this is as important as documentation!

3. Code Formatting & Linting

   • Formatted code makes your life and those who use/review your code easier. Standardized formatting with tools like black and isort (see the provided .pre-commit-config.yaml).

   • Pre-commit hooks to automate checks before pushing code! Follow their quick Guide to do this, but in short:

   (1) install it in your dev env

      pip install pre-commit
   

   (2) install the git hooks:

   pre-commit install
   

   (3) Just run it on your code BEFORE you git push:

   pre-commit run --all-files
   

4. Continuous Integration

   • Use GitHub Actions for automated testing and code quality checks

   • This template repo gies you built-in codespell, publish-book and pre-commit validations (go to actions in your repo to follow the guidelines to set up/also chatGPT can help ;)

5. Containerization

   • Docker setup for consistent development and deployment environments - this is not just an after thought, use Docker to develop and share your code!

   • Examples of Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml configurations (coming)

   • You are welcome/encouraged to use our containers: https://hub.docker.com/u/mmathislab

6. Data Workflow Integration

   • DataJoint examples for managing and querying scientific data pipelines - these are a must; use minimally for data + meta data storage, and use it to automate things you do daily (preprocessing, running DeepLabCut, etc!)

   • Templates for common workflows and schema management are here!

7. Style Guide for overall code & project management

   • Tips and practices for code, manuscripts, and figures.

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Contributions welcome as we refine this template!

Acknowledgement

Some items in this repo are adapted from DeepLabCut, CEBRA, and the Mathis Lab of Adaptive Intelligence. It is under an Apache 2.0 License.