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Contributing guidelines

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oobabooga edited this page Nov 2, 2023 · 22 revisions

Contributing guidelines

  1. Please submit your changes to the dev branch of the repository.
  2. Lint the changes that you have made. I use the following tools:
pyflakes file.py  # To check for errors
pycodestyle file.py  # To check for style problems

The following pycodestyle errors can be ignored:

  • E402 module level import not at top of file
  • E501 line too long
  • E722 do not use bare 'except'

The remaining errors should be fixed.

  1. Thoroughly self-test your code. Can you think of a scenario where it might not work as expected? Does it interfere with other parts of the program?

  2. Keep it simple, structured, and organized. Don't add more lines than you have to.

Scope

The main focus of this project is the Gradio UI, so you should familiarize yourself with Gradio: https://www.gradio.app/docs/interface

API

The UI takes precedence over the API: you should not add features exclusively to the API if they could be added to the UI first.

Extensions

As a rule of thumb, new extensions should be submitted to https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui-extensions. You are highly encouraged to submit your extensions to that list!

New built-in extensions can be accepted in cases where they would be useful to a large percentage of the user base, preferably while adding few or no additional dependencies.

Installation methods

There are two main installation methods for this project:

  1. Manual installation as described in the README.
  2. The one-click-installers.

Some Docker files are available in the repository, but I never use Docker. Pull requests about Docker should contain straightforward fixes or updates only.

Some important variables

  • shared.settings contains default values for Gradio components. It can be customized through a settings.yaml file.
  • shared.args contains the command-line arguments. They represent variables that need to be changed often.
  • shared.gradio contains the UI elements, like sliders and dropdowns. When defining Gradio event handlers, the gradio function in modules.utils can be used to write
gradio('history', 'character_menu', 'mode')

instead of

[shared.gradio[k] for k in ['history', 'character_menu', 'mode']]
  • The UI values are not passed directly to the generation functions. Instead, they are first fed into the shared.gradio['interface_state'] state variable. This variable receives the name state when used as input to backend functions. The code for updating shared.gradio['interface_state'] with the current UI values is the following (see server.py for several examples):
ui.gather_interface_values, gradio(shared.input_elements), gradio('interface_state')
  • The chat history is represented as a dictionary with the following structure:
{
    'internal': [['hi', 'hey'], ['how are you?', "i'm fine, thanks!"]], 
    'visible': [['hi', 'hey'], ['how are you?', "i'm fine, thanks!"]]
}

Each row is in the format [input, reply]. history['visible'] contains the messages as they will appear in the UI, and history['internal'] contains the messages as they appear in the prompt. When no extension is used, the two will be identical, but many extensions add images, audio widgets, or translations to history['visible'].

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