This page provides more detail on contributing a helper, first described in the contributing pages. As already described, if you are creating a helper, you should:

• add a module folder under helpme/main named according to your helper. You can start with another one of the helpers as a template.
• add the helper name to the defaults.py file in the HELPME_HELPERS list
• add the helper to be imported if specified in the get_helper function in helpme/main/__init__.py
• create an entry in the helpme/helpme.cfg config file

What are you responsible for?

Credentials and Settings

At the instantiation of each helper, the subclass function load_secrets is called. If your endpoint doesn’t require any tokens / settings or other, you don’t need to implement this for your Helper class. If You need to load or check for something, you should write this function for your class. You can take advantage of the many functions to

Submission

When the helper finishes, a data dictionary will be passed to your submit() function with the recordings, environments, and prompts that were asked for in the config above in a key:value dictionary. For example, given that we asked for user_prompt_issue, record_asciinema, record_environment, we might get something that looks like this:

$ self.data   ( -- self refers to the helper 
 {'record_prompt_issue': "Hi I can't get this command to run.",
  'record_asciinema': None,
  'record_environment': None }

It is up to you to parse the above into a well formualted API post to the helper endpoint on behalf of the user. Regardless of the settings in the application helpme.cfg, the user can choose to not record or collect extra metadata, and so your parsing of the functions should not expect these fields to be defined or provided. We recommend that you take advantage of the dictionary “get” function to ask for a value, and return None if the key is not defined in self.data:

$ value = self.data.get('record_prompt_issue')

Error Catching

You should generally take a conservative approach in handling your helper flow. For example, exit with the proper exit code if an environment variable that needs to be set by the user is missing, and use try, catch statements with specific errors.