Style Guide

The Ion code base generally follows the guidelines as set forth by PEP8.

Main Points

• Indent using 4 spaces.

• Use underscores in favor of camel case for all names except the names of classes.

• Limit all lines to a maximum of 79 characters.

• Limit the line length of docstrings or comments to 72 characters.

• Separate top-level functions and class definitions with two blank lines.

• Separate method definitions inside a class with a single blank line.

• Use two spaces before inline comment and one space between the pound sign and comment/

• Use a plugin for your text editor to check for/remind you of PEP8 conventions.

• Capitalize and punctuate comments and git commit messages properly.

Imports

• Group imports in the following order:

  1. Standard library imports

  2. Imports from core Django

  3. Related third-party imports

  4. Local application or library specific imports, imports from Django apps

• Avoid using import *

• Explicitly import each module used

Examples

Standard library imports:

from math import sqrt
from os.path import abspath

Core Django imports:

from django.db import models

Third-party app imports

from django_extensions.db.models import TimeStampedModel

Imports from your apps

from intranet.models import User

Explicit relative imports:

Used to avoid hardcoding a module's package. This greatly improves portability. Use these when importing from another module in the current app.

Absolute imports:

Used when importing outside the current app.

Implicit relative imports:

Don't use these. Using them makes it very difficult to change the name of the app, reducing portability.

Good:

from .models import SomeModel  # explicit relative import
from  otherdjangoapp.models import OtherModel  # absolute import

Bad:

from currentapp.models import MyModel  # implicit relative import

References

• Google Python Style Guide.
• Google HTML/CSS Style Guide.
• Google Javascript Style Guide.
• PEP8 Official Python Style Guide.