Code quality

The quality of the code is very important. That is why we have linters, unit tests, API docs, in-code docs, developer docs, modular code, and have put a lot of thought into the underlying architecture of both the backend and the web-frontend.

Running linters and tests

If you have the development environment up and running you can easily run the linters using just commands.

Backend (from project root or backend/ directory):

  • just b format: auto format all Python code using black.
  • just b sort: sort imports using isort.
  • just b fix: run both format and sort.
  • just b lint: check Python code with flake8, black, isort, and bandit.

Frontend (from project root or web-frontend/ directory):

  • just f lint: check JavaScript with eslint and SCSS with stylelint.
  • just f fix: auto-fix code style issues.

Running tests

There are also commands to easily run the tests.

  • just b test (backend): run all backend Python tests with pytest.
  • just b test -n=auto (backend): run tests in parallel for faster execution.
  • just f test (frontend): run all frontend tests with Jest.

Continuous integration

To make sure nothing was missed during development we also have a continuous integration pipeline that runs every time a branch is pushed. All the commands explained above will execute in an isolated environment. In order to improve speed they are separated by lint and test stages. It is not allowed to merge a branch if one of these jobs fails.

The pipeline also has a build job. During this job plugin boilerplate Baserow will be installed as a dependency to ensure that this still works.

Running CI locally

You can run the same checks locally before pushing:

# Run all linters
just lint

# Run all tests
just test

# Or run backend/frontend separately
just b lint && just b test
just f lint && just f test

For Docker-based CI testing (matches the CI environment more closely):

just ci build           # Build CI images
just ci lint            # Run linters in containers
just ci test            # Run tests in containers
just ci run             # Full CI pipeline
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