GitHub Development Process

This page describes the expected repository workflow from issue triage to merge.

Issue to branch

  1. Confirm scope and expected behavior in an issue.

  2. Create a feature branch from main (ideally from within the GitHub issue).

  3. Keep branch changes focused to one logical change.

Suggested branch naming (note, that this requires manually changing the suggested branch name when creating the branch within an issue):

  • <issue>/feature/<short-description>

  • <issue>/bugfix/<short-description>

  • <issue>/docs/<short-description>

  • <issue>/quality/<short-description>

  • …

Pull request

  1. Link relevant issue in the PR description. Ideally open an issue, first.

  2. Describe behavior changes and optionally test coverage, if not obvious from the issue.

  3. Add or update documentation for user-facing changes.

  4. Update Change Log for notable user-facing updates.

  5. Try to keep test coverage at or above 90% (the CI workflow will fail otherwise).

Checks and review

  • Required CI checks must pass.

  • The tests status check from .github/workflows/run-tests.yml is the required branch protection check.

  • For relevant code changes, full compatibility tests run through poetry run nox across the Django/DRF dependency matrix.

  • The full test workflow executes for each supported Python version.

  • For non-relevant changes, the dummy workflow path is used to satisfy branch protection without running the full suite.

  • Coverage checks must remain at or above the configured threshold.

  • Copilot review is requested automatically.

  • Manual maintainer review confirms behavior, tests, and documentation quality.

Review focus areas:

  • Correctness and regression risk

  • Test completeness

  • API/documentation consistency

  • Clarity and maintainability

Runtime dependency update flow

Runtime dependency updates (Django, Django REST Framework, Python support line) are handled manually from Renovate’s Dependency Dashboard issue or draft PRs.

For each runtime update cycle:

  1. Update constraints in pyproject.toml.

  2. Update Django/DRF test bounds in noxfile.py.

  3. Update the Python CI matrix in .github/workflows/run-tests-full.yml.

  4. Update classifiers in pyproject.toml where needed.

  5. Run tests and documentation checks, then open a PR.

Release handoff

The step-by-step release checklist (version bump, tagging, PyPI publish) is in Versioning and Releases. Repository-level and external service configuration is documented in Repository and Tooling Setup.