Introduction#

PyPackIT is an open-source, ready-to-use, cloud-based automation tool that streamlines every step of the software development life cycle, from initiation and configuration to deployment and long-term maintenance. In line with the latest software engineering best practices, it ensures the quality and FAIRness (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability) of software projects, while significantly accelerating development and lowering production costs at the same time. Promoting adoption and collaboration, PyPackIT specializes in the production of Python applications on GitHub—the most popular programming language and social coding platform, respectively. PyPackIT is readily installable in both new and existing GitHub repositories, providing them with a comprehensive and robust project infrastructure (Figure 1) including:

Control Center: A centralized user interface to automatically manage all project metadata and settings according to cloud-native practices like Infrastructure-as-Code and Continuous Configuration Automation. It enables dynamic content management for the entire project, simplifying setup, configuration, and maintenance via built-in templating, inheritance, and synchronization features that automatically apply modifications to all project components. Preconfigured according to the latest engineering best practices, it only requires users to fill project-specific metadata, while allowing for extensive customization.
Python Package: A build-ready package skeleton with all necessary source files and configuration files, automatically customized according to control center settings. Users only need to add application code to the provided source files, while PyPackIT automates all packaging, versioning, licensing, build, distribution, and indexing tasks. PyPackIT supports automatic deployment to various indexing repositories, including Anaconda, PyPI, Zenodo, GitHub Releases, and any Docker registry.
Test Suite: A fully operational testing infrastructure enabling immediate adoption of test-driven methodologies. Requiring users to only write test cases in the provided package, PyPackIT automatically performs unit, regression, end-to-end, and functional testing throughout the development life cycle. This ensures software quality and correctness, while improving awareness of software health status via notifications and reports. The test suite is automatically packaged and distributed along each release, facilitating the reproducibility of test results for verification of software functionality and performance.
Documentation: An automated documentation website deployed on GitHub Pages and Read The Docs platforms, leaving users with minimal documentation tasks such as writing issue tickets and docstrings. The website comes fully designed and prefilled with detailed developer and user manuals, and is automatically updated with project information, software API documentation, and comprehensive release notes and changelogs. Most website elements are dynamic and easily customizable via PyPackIT’s control center, requiring no knowledge in web design. The control center also enables the dynamic generation of any document file in Markdown format, such as a repository README file with dynamic status badges and other self-updating project information.

PyPackIT Key Features — Figure 1 PyPackIT’s key infrastructure elements (left) and workflows (right).#

After installation, PyPackIT automatically activates in response to various repository events, executing appropriate tasks on the GitHub Actions cloud computing platform. This establishes an automated pull-based software development workflow tailored to collaborative software engineering needs. PyPackIT’s workflow accelerates progress and innovation by promoting community engagement and feedback, while ensuring project continuation and sustainability by emphasizing proper task management, software inspection, and documentation. The workflow includes comprehensive Continuous software engineering pipelines that use the latest tools and technologies to establish an automated Agile software development process. This enables the experimental and highly iterative development of software, while reducing variance, complexity, cost, and risk. PyPackIT’s workflow automates the bulk of repetitive engineering and management activities throughout the software life cycle, including:

Issue Management: The project’s issue tracking system is dynamically maintained, supplied with specialized submission forms to collect type-specific user inputs in a structured and machine-readable format. This allows PyPackIT to automate issue management activities, such as ticket labeling and organization, bug triage, task assignment, design documentation, issue–commit linkage, and progress monitoring.
Version Control: To enable rapid project evolution while ensuring the long-term usability and sustainability of earlier releases, PyPackIT implements a specialized branching model and version scheme for simultaneous publication and support of multiple releases. Fully integrating with Git, PyPackIT’s workflow automates version control tasks such as branching, tagging, merging, and commit management.
Continuous Integration and Deployment: PyPackIT’s CI/CD pipelines automate tasks such as code style formatting, static code analysis, type checking, testing, build, containerization, and release to indexing repositories and online platforms, thus eliminating the need for dedicated integration and deployment teams, while increasing control, integrity, scalability, security, and transparency of the Agile development process.
Continuous Maintenance, Refactoring, and Testing: PyPackIT periodically performs automated maintenance and monitoring tasks to ensure the long-term sustainability of projects and the health of their development environments. Tasks include testing previous releases in up-to-date environments, updating dependencies and development tools, refactoring code, and cleaning up the repository to remove outdated artifacts such as builds, logs, and reports.

In summary, PyPackIT provides Python projects on GitHub with a comprehensive, dynamic, and highly customizable project skeleton along with a ready-to-use cloud-native development environment using GitHub Actions and GitHub Codespaces. This eliminates the need for manual project setup and configuration, enabling developers to immediately begin the actual implementation of software, even directly from the web browser. PyPackIT’s automated development workflow greatly simplifies the software development process, reducing manual tasks to writing issue tickets, application code, test cases, and minimal documentation. All other activities are automatically carried out on the cloud, consistently enforcing best practices throughout the software development life cycle. Since these repetitive software engineering and management activities are the most common cause of problems in many free and open-source software (FOSS) projects, their automation significantly accelerates development and improves product quality with minimal cost and effort. PyPackIT thus allows projects to focus solely on creative aspects, overcoming common challenges in FOSS development such as limited funding, time, staffing, and technical expertise.

Getting Started

Continue to the Motivation section where we outline key aspects of software engineering and the challenges they present to FOSS projects, highlighting PyPackIT’s solutions to these challenges. If you cannot wait to get started with PyPackIT, skip to the Overview section for a more in-depth summary of PyPackIT’s key features and capabilities, before proceeding to the User Manual for detailed instructions on how to install and use PyPackIT in your projects. The Background section offers supplementary information on key concepts, methodologies, tools, and technologies used in PyPackIT, and is referenced throughout the documentation.