docling/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>>

Coding Style Guidelines

We use the following tools to enforce code style:

• Ruff, as linter and code formatter
• 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:

pre-commit install

To run the checks on-demand, run:

pre-commit run --all-files

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

Tests

When submitting a new feature or fix, please consider adding a short test for it.

Reference test documents

When a change improves the conversion results, multiple reference documents must be regenerated and reviewed.

The reference data can be regenerated with

DOCLING_GEN_TEST_DATA=1 uv run pytest

All PRs modifying the reference test data require a double review to guarantee we don't miss edge cases.

Documentation

We use MkDocs to write documentation.

To run the documentation server, run:

mkdocs serve

The server will be available at http://localhost:8000.

Pushing Documentation to GitHub Pages

Run the following:

mkdocs gh-deploy