Contributing

Contributions are welcome. The best contributions keep the CLI small, predictable, and useful for research workflows.

Good First Contributions

• Improve documentation examples.
• Add tests for CLI edge cases.
• Improve error messages for network and download failures.
• Add formatter coverage for fields exposed by NBER.
• File issues with reproducible command output.

Before Opening a Pull Request

Run the local checks:

uv sync --dev --group docs
uv run pytest
uv run ruff check .
uv run --group docs mkdocs build --strict

Pull Request Expectations

• Keep changes focused.
• Add or update tests when behavior changes.
• Update English and Chinese documentation together when user-facing behavior changes.
• Avoid unrelated formatting churn.
• Explain any compatibility impact in the pull request description.

Documentation Changes

When adding a new documentation page:

1. Add the English page under docs/.
2. Add the Simplified Chinese page under docs/zh/.
3. Register both pages in mkdocs.yml.
4. Run uv run --group docs mkdocs build --strict.

Issue Reports

Useful issue reports include:

• The command that failed.
• The installed NBER-CLI version from nber-cli --version.
• The operating system and Python version.
• The full error output.
• Whether the same paper is accessible in a browser.