Development

The Trigger developement team is currently a one-man operation led by Jathan McCollum, aka jathanism.

Road Map

We are using milestones to track Trigger’s development path 30 to 90 days out. This is where we map outstanding issues to upcoming releases and is the best way to see what’s coming!

Contributing

There are several ways to get involved with Trigger:

  • Use Trigger and send us feedback! This is the best and easiest way to improve the project – let us know how you currently use Trigger and how you want to use it. (Please search the ticket tracker first, though, when submitting feature ideas.)

  • Report bugs. If you use Trigger and think you’ve found a bug, check on the ticket tracker to see if anyone’s reported it yet, and if not – file a bug! If you can, please try to make sure you can replicate the problem, and provide us with the info we need to reproduce it ourselves (what version of Trigger you’re using, what platform you’re on, and what exactly you were doing when the bug cropped up.)

  • Submit patches or new features. Make a Github account, create a fork of the main Trigger repository, and submit a pull request.

All contributors will receive proper attribution for their work. We want to give credit where it is due!

Communication

If an issue ticket exists for a given issue, please keep all communication in that ticket’s comments. Otherwise, please use whatever avenue of communication works best for you!

Style

Trigger tries very diligently to honor PEP-8, especially (but not limited to!) the following:

  • Keep all lines under 80 characters. This goes for the ReST documentation as well as code itself.

    • Exceptions are made for situations where breaking a long string (such as a string being print-ed from source code, or an especially long URL link in documentation) would be kind of a pain.

  • Typical Python 4-space (soft-tab) indents. No tabs! No 8 space indents! (No 2- or 3-space indents, for that matter!)

  • CamelCase class names, but lowercase_underscore_separated everything else.

Pre-commit Hooks

Trigger uses prek, a fast Rust-based pre-commit framework, to automatically check code quality before commits.

Installation:

# Using uv (recommended)
uv tool install prek

# Or using pip
pip install prek

# Or download standalone binary
# https://github.com/j178/prek/releases

Setup:

# Enable hooks for this repository
cd /path/to/trigger
prek install

Usage:

# Hooks run automatically on git commit
git commit -m "your changes"

# Manually run all hooks
prek run --all-files

# Run specific hook
prek run ruff

The pre-commit hooks automatically check for:

  • Code style and linting with ruff (matching CI configuration)

  • Proper formatting with ruff format

  • YAML syntax errors

  • Trailing whitespace and file endings

  • Merge conflict markers

  • Accidental commits to the main branch

Performance: prek is 7-10x faster than traditional pre-commit and uses approximately 50% less disk space, making it ideal for large codebases.

For more information, see the CLAUDE.md development guide.

Branching/Repository Layout

All development happens on the main branch. There is no separate develop or master branch. Pull requests should always target main and are merged using rebase merges (no merge commits).

Releases are cut by tagging a commit on main (e.g. v2.0.1). If you need a specific version, check out the corresponding tag.

We use conventional commits (enforced via prek/pre-commit hooks) which drive automated semantic versioning.

Releases

We use semantic versioning. Version numbers should follow this format:

{Major version}.{Minor version}.{Revision number}.{Build number (optional)}

Major

Major releases update the first number, e.g. going from 0.9 to 1.0, and indicate that the software has reached some very large milestone.

For example, the 1.0 release signified a commitment to a medium to long term API and some significant backwards incompatible (compared to the 0.9 series) features. Version 2.0 might indicate a rewrite using a new underlying network technology or an overhaul to be more object-oriented.

Major releases will often be backwards-incompatible with the previous line of development, though this is not a requirement, just a usual happenstance. Users should expect to have to make at least some changes to their settings.py when switching between major versions.

Minor

Minor releases, such as moving from 1.0 to 1.1, typically mean that one or more new, large features has been added. They are also sometimes used to mark off the fact that a lot of bug fixes or small feature modifications have occurred since the previous minor release. (And, naturally, some of them will involve both at the same time.)

These releases are guaranteed to be backwards-compatible with all other releases containing the same major version number, so a settings.py that works with 1.0 should also work fine with 1.1 or even 1.9.

Bugfix/tertiary

The third and final part of version numbers, such as the ‘3’ in 1.0.3, generally indicate a release containing one or more bugfixes, although minor feature modifications may (rarely) occur.

This third number is sometimes omitted for the first major or minor release in a series, e.g. 1.2 or 2.0, and in these cases it can be considered an implicit zero (e.g. 2.0.0).

Adding Support for New Vendors

Interested in adding support for a new vendor to Trigger? Awesome! Please see Adding New Vendors to Trigger to get started. (Hint: It’s a work in progress!)