This site documents common tooling we use in research software Python projects at the Centre for Advanced Research Computing (ARC) at UCL.

These pages started as a forum to share knowledge across projects and have now grown into a list of our default recommendations. Each page contains a table of packages, tools, or services that are useful when building a Python package. Each entry has

• a link to the package or service,
• a short summary of what it does,
• and traffic light!

Choosing tools

If you are working within a larger community, always start with the same tools they recommend. For example, the napari community have a cookiecutter-napari-plugin template and the SciKit-Surgery community have PythonTemplate, both used to create new Python-based libraries. Using common tooling and structure makes it easier for others in the community to contribute to your package. Once you get used to the structure makes it easier for you to contribute back to other packages.

If you just want to get started with our recommendations, we have our own Python package template that lives in the same repository as these pages.

Otherwise, each page on this site highlights recommended packages or services for each area. These should not be taken as set in stone for every project, but are a good place to start.

Traffic lights

Each item has an (opinionated) traffic light. The meaning of these is:

• 🟢 At least one person in ARC uses this. We actively recommend using it above other tools. It is the single recommended tool for a given purpose.
• 🟠 We don’t discourage using this, but it may duplicate functionality of a green tool.
• 🔴 We actively discourage using this. This could be because it’s no longer maintained, not open source, or difficult to use. Consider moving to alternatives if you’re currently using something that’s red. A reason for not using this is given.