ITensor Development Frequently Asked Questions

What are the steps to contribute code to ITensor?

Please contact us (support at itensor.org) if you are planning to submit a major contribution (more than a few lines of code, say). If so, we would like to discuss your plan and design before you spend significant time on it, to increase the chances we will merge your pull request.
Fork the ITensors.jl Github repo, create a new branch and make changes (commits) on that branch. ITensor imposes code formatting for contributions. Please run using JuliaFormatter; format(".") in the project directory to ensure formatting. As an alternative you may also use pre-commit. Install pre-commit with e.g. pip install pre-commit, then run pre-commit install in the project directory in order for pre-commit to run automatically before any commit.
Run the ITensor unit tests by going into the test/ folder and running julia runtests.jl. To run individual test scripts, start a Julia REPL (interactive terminal) session and include each script, such as include("itensor.jl").
Push your new branch and changes to your forked repo. Github will give you the option to make a pull request (PR) out of your branch that will be submitted to us, and which you can view under the list of ITensors.jl pull requests. If your PR's tests pass and we approve your changes, we will merge it or ask you to merge it. If you merge your PR, please use the Squash and Merge option. We may also ask you to make more changes to bring your PR in line with our design goals or technical requirements.