Explanation¶
Launchpad brings together tools for hosting code, tracking bugs, publishing packages, coordinating translations, and more. These pages explain how the key features and systems work. For an overview, see feature highlights or What is Launchpad.
Your Launchpad account¶
There are different ways to contribute in Launchpad, and your contributions are tracked through a Karma points system. You can also subscribe to get email notifications to stay informed on projects, bugs, and teams you are following.
Community and collaboration¶
You can contact other contributors on Launchpad, but also manage who can see your contact information. There are defined policies around privacy, confidentiality, and the disclosure of personal and project information.
Launchpad Answers¶
Launchpad Answers is a community Q&A tracker where users can post questions about projects and receive answers from other community members or designated answer contacts. Projects can embed the tracker in their support workflow and build up a library of stock answers.
Projects, packages, and translations¶
Launchpad organizes software around projects, which can have series, milestones, and releases. You can distribute packages through Personal Package Archives (PPAs) and coordinate localization using the Translations feature.
Code hosting¶
Launchpad hosts Git repositories, supports importing code from external platforms, and provides a CI pipeline for running automated checks against your code.
Teams¶
Teams allow you to group contributors and assign them roles, permissions, and responsibilities across projects. Teams can own projects, have their own code branches, and act collectively as answer contacts or reviewers.
Launchpad API and launchpadlib¶
Launchpad exposes most of its objects and actions through a REST API.
launchpadlib is the official Python client that wraps this API, letting
you work with Launchpad resources as Python objects in scripts and
applications.
Testing and troubleshooting¶
Launchpad provides a staging environment where you can test integrations and workflows without affecting production data. When errors occur, Launchpad generates an OOPS ID that you can include when filing a support request to help the team investigate.