docling-core/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing In General

Our project welcomes external contributions. If you have an itch, please feel free to scratch it.

For more details on the contributing guidelines head to the Docling Project community repository.

Developing

Usage of uv

We use uv as package and project manager.

Installation

To install uv, check the documentation on Installing uv.

Create an environment and sync it

You can use the uv sync to create a project virtual environment (if it does not already exist) and sync the project's dependencies with the environment.

uv sync

Use a specific Python version (optional)

If you need to work with a specific version of Python, you can create a new virtual environment for that version and run the sync command:

uv venv --python 3.12
uv sync

More detailed options are described on the Using Python environments documentation.

Add a new dependency

Simply use the uv add command. The pyproject.toml and uv.lock files will be updated.

uv add [OPTIONS] <PACKAGES|--requirements <REQUIREMENTS>>

Code sytle guidelines

We use the following tools to enforce code style:

• isort, to sort imports
• Black, to format code
• Flake8, to lint code
• autoflake, to remove unused variables and imports
• MyPy, as static type checker

A set of styling checks, as well as regression tests, are defined and managed through the pre-commit framework. To ensure that those scripts run automatically before a commit is finalized, install pre-commit on your local repository:

uv run pre-commit install

To run the checks on-demand, type:

uv run pre-commit run --all-files

Note: Checks like Black and isort will fail if they modify files. This is because pre-commit doesn't like to see files modified by their hooks. In these cases, git add the modified files and git commit again.

Documentation

We use JSON Schema for Humans to generate Markdown pages documenting the JSON schema of the Docling objects.

The documentation pages are stored in docs folder and are updated at every commit, as part of the pre-commit check hooks. To generate the documentation on-demand, run:

uv run python -m docling_core.utils.generate_docs docs