1. Please sign one of the contributor license agreements below.
2. Fork the repo, develop and test your code changes, add docs.
3. Make sure that your commit messages clearly describe the changes.
4. Send a pull request. (Please Read: Faster Pull Request Reviews)

In order to add a feature:

• The feature must be documented in both the API and narrative documentation.
• The feature must work fully on the following CPython versions: 3.9, 3.10, 3.11, 3.12, 3.13 and 3.14 on both UNIX and Windows.
• The feature must not add unnecessary dependencies (where "unnecessary" is of course subjective, but new dependencies should be discussed).

You'll have to create a development environment using a Git checkout:

• While logged into your GitHub account, navigate to the python-bigquery repo on GitHub.

• Fork and clone the python-bigquery repository to your GitHub account by clicking the "Fork" button.

• Clone your fork of python-bigquery from your GitHub account to your local computer, substituting your account username and specifying the destination as hack-on-python-bigquery. E.g.:

  $ cd ${HOME}
  $ git clone git@github.com:USERNAME/python-bigquery.git hack-on-python-bigquery
  $ cd hack-on-python-bigquery
  # Configure remotes such that you can pull changes from the googleapis/python-bigquery
  # repository into your local repository.
  $ git remote add upstream git@github.com:googleapis/python-bigquery.git
  # fetch and merge changes from upstream into main
  $ git fetch upstream
  $ git merge upstream/main
  

Now your local repo is set up such that you will push changes to your GitHub repo, from which you can submit a pull request.

To work on the codebase and run the tests, we recommend using nox, but you can also use a virtualenv of your own creation.

We use nox to instrument our tests.

• To test your changes, run unit tests with nox::

  $ nox -s unit

• To run a single unit test:

  $ nox -s unit-3.13 -- -k <name of test>
  

  Note

  The unit tests and system tests are described in the noxfile.py files in each directory.

If the error mentions Python.h not being found, install python-dev and try again. On Debian/Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install python-dev

• We use the automatic code formatter black. You can run it using the nox session blacken. This will eliminate many lint errors. Run via:

  $ nox -s blacken
  

• PEP8 compliance is required, with exceptions defined in the linter configuration. If you have nox installed, you can test that you have not introduced any non-compliant code via:

  $ nox -s lint
  

• In order to make nox -s lint run faster, you can set some environment variables:

  export GOOGLE_CLOUD_TESTING_REMOTE="upstream"
  export GOOGLE_CLOUD_TESTING_BRANCH="main"
  

  By doing this, you are specifying the location of the most up-to-date version of python-bigquery. The remote name upstream should point to the official googleapis checkout and the branch should be the default branch on that remote (main).

• This repository contains configuration for the pre-commit tool, which automates checking our linters during a commit. If you have it installed on your $PATH, you can enable enforcing those checks via:

$ pre-commit install
pre-commit installed at .git/hooks/pre-commit

Exceptions to PEP8:

• Many unit tests use a helper method, _call_fut ("FUT" is short for "Function-Under-Test"), which is PEP8-incompliant, but more readable. Some also use a local variable, MUT (short for "Module-Under-Test").

• To run system tests, you can execute:

  # Run all system tests
  $ nox -s system
  
  # Run a single system test
  $ nox -s system-3.13 -- -k <name of test>
  

  Note

  System tests are only configured to run under Python 3.9 and 3.13. For expediency, we do not run them in older versions of Python 3.

  This alone will not run the tests. You'll need to change some local auth settings and change some configuration in your project to run all the tests.

• System tests will be run against an actual project. You should use local credentials from gcloud when possible. See Best practices for application authentication. Some tests require a service account. For those tests see Authenticating as a service account.

• The codebase must have 100% test statement coverage after each commit. You can test coverage via nox -s cover.

If you fix a bug, and the bug requires an API or behavior modification, all documentation in this package which references that API or behavior must be changed to reflect the bug fix, ideally in the same commit that fixes the bug or adds the feature.

Build the docs via:

$ nox -s docs

Code samples and snippets live in the samples/ catalogue. Feel free to provide more examples, but make sure to write tests for those examples. Each folder containing example code requires its own noxfile.py script which automates testing. If you decide to create a new folder, you can base it on the samples/snippets folder (providing noxfile.py and the requirements files).

The tests will run against a real Google Cloud Project, so you should configure them just like the System Tests.

• To run sample tests, you can execute:

  # Run all tests in a folder
  $ cd samples/snippets
  $ nox -s py-3.9
  
  # Run a single sample test
  $ cd samples/snippets
  $ nox -s py-3.9 -- -k <name of test>
  

The description on PyPI for the project comes directly from the README. Due to the reStructuredText (rst) parser used by PyPI, relative links which will work on GitHub (e.g. CONTRIBUTING.rst instead of https://github.com/googleapis/python-bigquery/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.rst) may cause problems creating links or rendering the description.

We support:

• Python 3.9
• Python 3.10
• Python 3.11
• Python 3.12
• Python 3.13
• Python 3.14

Supported versions can be found in our noxfile.py config.

We also explicitly decided to support Python 3 beginning with version 3.9. Reasons for this include:

• Encouraging use of newest versions of Python 3
• Taking the lead of prominent open-source projects
• Unicode literal support which allows for a cleaner codebase that works in both Python 2 and Python 3

This library follows Semantic Versioning.

Some packages are currently in major version zero (0.y.z), which means that anything may change at any time and the public API should not be considered stable.

Before we can accept your pull requests you'll need to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA):

• If you are an individual writing original source code and you own the intellectual property, then you'll need to sign an individual CLA.
• If you work for a company that wants to allow you to contribute your work, then you'll need to sign a corporate CLA.

You can sign these electronically (just scroll to the bottom). After that, we'll be able to accept your pull requests.