A Python Project Template for Healthy Scientific Software

Abstract

Abstract The creation of “healthy” scientific software is vital for its successful long-term adoption in scientific research. Here healthy code is defined to mean software that is usable, maintainable, and proffers consistently reproducible results. Incorporating tooling and practices to achieve these goals often leads to short-term, yet significant, overhead for new projects. We introduce the LINCC Frameworks Python Project Template, a configurable code template designed for scientific software projects that greatly simplifies adopting best practices by automating the setup and configuration of important tools locally and via a suite of GitHub workflows. Notably, the template does not include any application-specific code, thereby enabling users to focus on their scientific code rather than building or maintaining code infrastructure.