Contributing¶

Welcome to the contributor guide of Ultimate Notion.

This document focuses on getting any potential contributor familiarized with the development processes, but other kinds of contributions are also appreciated.

If you are new to using git or have never collaborated on a project previously, please have a look at contribution-guide.org. Other resources are also listed in the excellent guide created by FreeCodeCamp ¹.

Please notice that all users and contributors are expected to be open, considerate, reasonable, and respectful. When in doubt, Python Software Foundation's Code of Conduct is a good reference in terms of behavior guidelines.

Issue Reports¶

If you experience bugs or general issues with Ultimate Notion, please have a look at the issue tracker. If you don't see anything useful there, please feel free to file an issue report.

New issue reports should include information about your programming environment (e.g., operating system, Python version) and steps to reproduce the problem. Please also try to simplify the reproduction steps to a very minimal example that still illustrates the problem you are facing. By removing other factors, you help us to identify the root cause of the issue.

Documentation improvements¶

You can help improve the documentation of Ultimate Notion by making them more readable and coherent, or by adding missing information and correcting mistakes.

This documentation uses mkdocs as its main documentation compiler. This means that the docs are kept in the same repository as the project code, and that any documentation update is done in the same way as a code contribution.

When working on documentation changes in your local machine, you can build and serve them using hatch with hatch run docs:build and hatch run docs:serve, respectively.

Code Contributions¶

Submit an issue¶

Before you work on any non-trivial code contribution it's best to first create a report in the issue tracker to start a discussion on the subject. This often provides additional considerations and avoids unnecessary work.

Clone the repository¶

1. Create a user account on GitHub if you do not already have one.

2. Fork the project repository: click on the Fork button near the top of the page. This creates a copy of the code under your account on GitHub.

3. Clone this copy to your local disk:

   git clone git@github.com:YourLogin/ultimate-notion.git
   cd ultimate-notion
   

4. Make sure hatch and pre-commit are installed using pipx:

   pipx install hatch
   pipx install pre-commit
   

5. Optionally run hatch config set dirs.env.virtual .direnv to let VS Code find your virtual environments. If you are using VS Code, then it's quite convenient to add a file .vscode/.env in your checkout with:

   NOTION_TOKEN=TOKEN_TO_YOUR_TEST_NOTION_ACCOUNT
   ULTIMATE_NOTION_CONFIG=/path/to/repo/.ultimate-notion/config.toml
   

   These settings will also be respected by pytest using pytest-dotenv.

Set up the unit tests¶

Ultimate Notion deals with unit tests in two ways. Most tests are recorded as cassettes using VCR.py, which captures the HTTP interactions a test makes the first time it runs against the Notion API and replays them on subsequent runs. This lets the suite run offline and much faster, with no Notion account needed:

hatch run vcr-only

You only need your own Notion workspace and integration token if you want to run the tests live against the Notion API, or to add a new test or re-record an existing cassette:

hatch run vcr-rewrite          # re-record all cassettes
hatch run test -k NEW_TEST     # run/record a specific test live

Running tests live requires a configured test workspace, described next.

Set up a Notion test workspace¶

You only need this section to run the tests live or to re-record cassettes.

1. Create an internal integration. Open My integrations and click New integration. Choose Internal, associate it with the workspace you want to use for testing, and give it a name.

2. Enable the required capabilities. On the integration's Capabilities tab enable:

3. Read, Update and Insert content, because the tests create, modify and delete pages and databases.

4. A Read user information option (with or without email addresses is fine). This is required: several tests call Session.all_users(), which Notion rejects with 403 "Personal access tokens cannot list users." for tokens that lack this capability. For the same reason you must use an internal integration token, not a personal access token. The latter can never list users.

5. Copy the token. From the integration's Configuration page copy the Internal Integration Secret. It looks like ntn_….

6. Create and share a root page. In your test workspace create a page that acts as the parent for all test content, then connect your integration to it via the page's ••• menu → Connections. Sharing the parent grants the integration access to everything created beneath it. By default the suite looks for a page titled Tests; set the UNO_TEST_ROOT_PAGE environment variable to point it at a page with a different title.

7. Point the configuration at the token. Set NOTION_TOKEN to the secret from step 3 (see the .vscode/.env example above); the Ultimate Notion config resolves the token from this environment variable by default.

8. Bootstrap the API-creatable objects. Run:

UNO_TEST_ROOT_PAGE='My Test Root' hatch run bootstrap-test-workspace

The command is idempotent and leaves existing objects unchanged.

Add a new live (VCR) test¶

The committed cassettes are one coherent recording of a single workspace, so you cannot simply vcr-rewrite a new test against your own workspace and commit the result: vcr-rewrite replays the shared fixture cassettes in tests/cassettes/fixtures/ (the Tests root page, the seeded databases, …) with your workspace's ids, which then diverge from the rest of the suite. Record a new test like this instead:

# 1. Bootstrap your workspace (root page named `Tests`, or set UNO_TEST_ROOT_PAGE).
# 2. Delete the shared fixture cassettes so they record fresh against your workspace
#    (vcr-rewrite otherwise downgrades them to `new_episodes` and replays committed ids).
rm tests/cassettes/fixtures/mod_*.yaml
# 3. Record only your new test.
NOTION_TOKEN=ntn_… hatch run vcr-rewrite -k your_new_test
# 4. Keep ONLY your new test's cassette; restore the shared fixtures unchanged.
git checkout -- tests/cassettes/fixtures
# 5. Verify it replays offline against the committed fixtures.
hatch run vcr-only -k your_new_test

This works because cassettes are matched by request path and (for POST /v1/search) by request body, and because the ids of the shared workspace objects are normalised to stable placeholders when cassettes are written. The root page, the seeded static pages/databases, the integration bot, the workspace members and the workspace itself are recognised during recording and every occurrence of their ids — in request paths/bodies and in response bodies — is rewritten to a fixed placeholder (see the shared-id normalisation in tests/conftest.py). The same normalisation is applied when matching, so a test that asserts identity against a shared fixture (e.g. page.parent == root_page) or puts a shared object's id in a request path (e.g. GET /v1/blocks/{root_id}/children) replays against the committed fixtures even though it was recorded against your workspace's ids. Content you create under root_page keeps its own (non-shared) ids, which are internally consistent within the recording and so replay cleanly.

To support recording against a root page that cannot be named Tests, the non-default title configured via UNO_TEST_ROOT_PAGE is also scrubbed back to Tests when cassettes are written. Property, option and block ids inside the manually created databases are workspace-specific and are not normalised, so a brand-new test that asserts on those (e.g. a formula's internal property reference) may still need a hand edit.

Implement your changes¶

1. Create a branch to hold your changes:

   git switch -c my-feature
   

   and start making changes. Never work on the main branch!

2. Start your work on this branch. Don't forget to add docstrings in Google style to new functions, modules and classes, especially if they are part of public APIs.

3. Check that your changes don't break any unit tests with hatch run vcr-only for tests that do not generate calls to the Notion API or hatch run test for new tests generating API calls.

4. Run hatch run lint:all and hatch run lint:fix to check the code with ruff & mypy and automatically fix ruff issues if possible.

5. Add yourself to the list of contributors in AUTHORS.md.

6. When you’re done editing, do:

   git add <MODIFIED FILES>
   git commit
   

   to record your changes in git.\ Please make sure you see the validation messages from pre-commit and fix any remaining issues.

git log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --all

Submit your contribution¶

1. If everything works fine, push your local branch to the remote server with:

   git push -u origin my-feature
   

2. Go to the GitHub page of your fork and click "Create pull request" to send your changes for review.

Find more detailed information in creating a PR. You might also want to open the PR as a draft first and mark it as ready for review after the feedbacks from the continuous integration (CI) system or any required fixes.