nanobot/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to nanobot

Thank you for your interest in contributing! This guide will help you get started.

Maintainers

Maintainer	Focus
@re-bin	Project lead, main branch
@chengyongru	nightly branch, experimental features

Branching Strategy

nanobot uses a two-branch model to balance stability and innovation:

Branch	Purpose	Stability
main	Stable releases	Production-ready
nightly	Experimental features	May have bugs or breaking changes

Which Branch Should I Target?

Target nightly if your PR includes:

• New features or functionality
• Refactoring that may affect existing behavior
• Changes to APIs or configuration

Target main if your PR includes:

• Bug fixes with no behavior changes
• Documentation improvements
• Minor tweaks that don't affect functionality

When in doubt, target nightly. It's easier to cherry-pick stable changes to main than to revert unstable changes.

How Does Nightly Get Merged to Main?

We don't merge the entire nightly branch. Instead, stable features are cherry-picked from nightly into individual PRs targeting main:

nightly  ──┬── feature A (stable) ──► PR ──► main
           ├── feature B (testing)
           └── feature C (stable) ──► PR ──► main

This happens approximately once a week, but the timing depends on when features become stable enough.

Quick Summary

Your Change	Target Branch
New feature	nightly
Bug fix	main
Documentation	main
Refactoring	nightly
Unsure	nightly

Development Setup

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/HKUDS/nanobot.git
cd nanobot

# Install with dev dependencies
pip install -e ".[dev]"

# Run tests
pytest

# Lint code
ruff check nanobot/

# Format code
ruff format nanobot/

Code Style

• Line length: 100 characters (ruff)
• Target: Python 3.11+
• Linting: ruff with rules E, F, I, N, W (E501 ignored)
• Async: Uses asyncio throughout; pytest with asyncio_mode = "auto"

Questions?

Feel free to open an issue or join our community:

• Discord
• Feishu/WeChat