Contributing docs (#162)

Author: maxwellflitton

CONTRIBUTING.md

@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ If you are worried or don’t know where to start, check out our next section ex
 Please help us keep SurrealDB open and inclusive. Kindly read and follow our [Code of Conduct](/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md).
 
 <!--
---------------------------------------------------
+---**----**-------------------------------------------
 ONLY RELEVANT FOR CLIENT SDK REPOSITORIES
 --------------------------------------------------
 -->

README.md

@@ -129,7 +129,58 @@ with Surreal("ws://localhost:8000/rpc") as db:
 ## Next steps
 
 Now that you have learned the basics of the SurrealDB SDK for Python, you can learn more about the SDK and its methods [in the methods section](https://surrealdb.com/docs/sdk/python/methods) and [data types section](https://surrealdb.com/docs/sdk/python/data-types).
+
 ## Contributing
+
 Contributions to this library are welcome! If you encounter issues, have feature requests, or 
 want to make improvements, feel free to open issues or submit pull requests.
 
+If you want to contribute to the Github repo please read the general contributing guidelines on concepts such as how to create a pull requests [here](https://github.com/surrealdb/surrealdb.py/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md).
+
+## Getting the repo up and running
+
+To contribute, it's a good idea to get the repo up and running first. We can do this by running the tests. If the tests pass, your `PYTHONPATH` works and the client is making successful calls to the database. To do this we must run the database with the following command:
+
+```bash
+# if the docker-compose binary is installed
+docker-compose up -d
+
+# if you are running docker compose directly through docker
+docker compose up -d
+```
+
+Now that the database is running, we can enter a terminal session with all the requirements installed and `PYTHONPATH` configured with the command below:
+
+```bash
+bash scripts/term.sh
+```
+
+You will now be running an interactive terminal through a python virtual environment with all the dependencies installed. We can now run the tests with the following command:
+
+```bash
+python -m unittest discover
+```
+
+The number of tests might increase but at the time of writing this you should get a printout like the one below:
+
+```bash
+.........................................................................................................................................Error in live subscription: sent 1000 (OK); no close frame received
+..........................................................................................
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+Ran 227 tests in 6.313s
+
+OK
+```
+Finally, we clean up the database with the command below:
+```bash
+# if the docker-compose binary is installed
+docker-compose down
+
+# if you are running docker compose directly through docker
+docker compose down
+```
+To exit the terminal session merely execute the following command:
+```bash
+exit
+```
+ And there we have it, our tests are passing.

scripts/term.sh

@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@
+#!/usr/bin/env bash
+
+# navigate to directory
+SCRIPTPATH="$( cd "$(dirname "$0")" ; pwd -P )"
+cd $SCRIPTPATH
+
+# Define the PYTHONPATH for the terminal session
+cd ../src
+export PYTHONPATH=$(pwd)
+cd ..
+
+# Configure the virtual environment if needed
+if [ -d "venv" ]; then
+  echo "existing python virtual environment exists."
+else
+  echo "python virtual environment does not exist. Creating one"
+  python3 -m venv venv
+fi
+
+# start the terminal session
+source venv/bin/activate
+pip install -r requirements.txt
+echo "now running in virtual environment. Execute the 'exit' to exit the virtual env terminal"
+bash --norc