Thank you for your interest in contributing to our project. Whether it's a bug report, new feature, correction, or additional documentation, we greatly value feedback and contributions from our community.

Please read through this document before submitting any issues or pull requests to ensure we have all the necessary information to effectively respond to your bug report or contribution.

We welcome you to use the Bug Reports file to report bugs or Feature Requests to suggest features.

For a list of known bugs and feature requests:

• Check Bug Reports for currently tracked issues
• See Feature Requests for requested enhancements

When filing an issue, please check for already tracked items

Please try to include as much information as you can. Details like these are incredibly useful:

• A reproducible test case or series of steps
• The version of our code being used (commit ID)
• Any modifications you've made relevant to the bug
• Anything unusual about your environment or deployment

Looking at the existing issues is a great way to find something to contribute to. We label issues that are well-defined and ready for community contributions with the "ready for contribution" label.

Check our Ready for Contribution issues for items you can work on.

Before starting work on any issue:

1. Check if someone is already assigned or working on it
2. Comment on the issue to express your interest and ask any clarifying questions
3. Wait for maintainer confirmation before beginning significant work

Our team follows these core principles when designing and implementing features. These tenets help us make consistent decisions, resolve trade-offs, and maintain the quality and coherence of the SDK. When contributing, please consider how your changes align with these principles:

1. Simple at any scale: We believe that simple things should be simple. The same clean abstractions that power a weekend prototype should scale effortlessly to production workloads. We reject the notion that enterprise-grade means enterprise-complicated - Strands remains approachable whether it's your first agent or your millionth.
2. Extensible by design: We allow for as much configuration as possible, from hooks to model providers, session managers, tools, etc. We meet customers where they are with flexible extension points that are simple to integrate with.
3. Composability: Primitives are building blocks with each other. Each feature of Strands is developed with all other features in mind, they are consistent and complement one another.
4. The obvious path is the happy path: Through intuitive naming, helpful error messages, and thoughtful API design, we guide developers toward correct patterns and away from common pitfalls.
5. We are accessible to humans and agents: Strands is designed for both humans and AI to understand equally well. We don’t take shortcuts on curated DX for humans and we go the extra mile to make sure coding assistants can help you use those interfaces the right way.
6. Embrace common standards: We respect what came before, and do not want to reinvent something that is already widely adopted or done better.

When proposing solutions or reviewing code, we reference these principles to guide our decisions. If two approaches seem equally valid, we choose the one that best aligns with our tenets.

This project uses hatchling as the build backend and hatch for development workflow management.

1. Entering virtual environment using hatch (recommended), then launch your IDE in the new shell.

   hatch shell

2. Set up pre-commit hooks:

   pre-commit install -t pre-commit -t commit-msg

   This will automatically run formatters and conventional commit checks on your code before each commit.

3. Run code formatters manually:

   hatch fmt --formatter

4. Run linters:

   hatch fmt --linter

5. Run unit tests:

   hatch test

   Or run them with coverage:

   hatch test -c

6. Run integration tests:

   hatch run test-integ

We use pre-commit to automatically run quality checks before each commit. The hook will run hatch run format, hatch run lint, hatch run test, and hatch run cz check when you make a commit, ensuring code consistency.

The pre-commit hook is installed with:

pre-commit install

You can also run the hooks manually on all files:

pre-commit run --all-files

We use the following tools to ensure code quality:

1. ruff - For formatting and linting
2. mypy - For static type checking

These tools are configured in the pyproject.toml file. Please ensure your code passes all linting and type checks before submitting a pull request:

# Run all checks
hatch fmt --formatter
hatch fmt --linter

If you're using an IDE like VS Code or PyCharm, consider configuring it to use these tools automatically.

For additional details on styling, please see our dedicated Style Guide.

Contributions via pull requests are much appreciated. Before sending us a pull request, please ensure that:

1. You are working against the latest source on the main branch.
2. You check existing open, and recently merged, pull requests to make sure someone else hasn't addressed the problem already.
3. You open an issue to discuss any significant work - we would hate for your time to be wasted.

To send us a pull request, please:

1. Create a branch.
2. Modify the source; please focus on the specific change you are contributing. If you also reformat all the code, it will be hard for us to focus on your change.
3. Format your code using hatch fmt --formatter.
4. Run linting checks with hatch fmt --linter.
5. Ensure local tests pass with hatch test and hatch run test-integ.
6. Commit to your branch using clear commit messages following the Conventional Commits specification.
7. Send us a pull request, answering any default questions in the pull request interface.
8. Pay attention to any automated CI failures reported in the pull request, and stay involved in the conversation.

This project has adopted the Amazon Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opensource-codeofconduct@amazon.com with any additional questions or comments.

If you discover a potential security issue in this project we ask that you notify AWS/Amazon Security via our vulnerability reporting page. Please do not create a public github issue.

See the LICENSE file for our project's licensing. We will ask you to confirm the licensing of your contribution.