Contributing to Hoodie

Please take a moment to review this document in order to make the contribution process easy and effective for everyone involved.

Following these guidelines helps to communicate that you respect the time of the developers managing and developing this open source project. In return, they should reciprocate that respect in addressing your issue, assessing changes, and helping you finalize your pull requests.

As for everything else in the project, the contributions to Hoodie are governed by our Code of Conduct.

Using the issue tracker

First things first: Do NOT report security vulnerabilities in public issues! Please disclose responsibly by letting the Hoodie team know upfront. We will assess the issue as soon as possible on a best-effort basis and will give you an estimate for when we have a fix and release available for an eventual public disclosure.

The issue tracker is the preferred channel for bug reports, features requests and submitting pull requests, but please respect the following restrictions:

  • Please do not use the issue tracker for personal support requests. Use the Hoodie Chat.
  • Please do not derail or troll issues. Keep the discussion on topic and respect the opinions of others.

Bug reports

A bug is a demonstrable problem that is caused by the code in the repository. Good bug reports are extremely helpful - thank you!

Guidelines for bug reports:

  1. Use the GitHub issue search — check if the issue has already been reported.
  2. Check if the issue has been fixed — try to reproduce it using the latest master or next branch in the repository.
  3. Isolate the problem — ideally create a reduced test case.

A good bug report shouldn’t leave others needing to chase you up for more information. Please try to be as detailed as possible in your report. What is your environment? What steps will reproduce the issue? What OS experiences the problem? What would you expect to be the outcome? All these details will help people to fix any potential bugs.

Example:

Short and descriptive example bug report title

A summary of the issue and the browser/OS environment in which it occurs. If suitable, include the steps required to reproduce the bug.

  1. This is the first step
  2. This is the second step
  3. Further steps, etc.

<url> - a link to the reduced test case

Any other information you want to share that is relevant to the issue being reported. This might include the lines of code that you have identified as causing the bug, and potential solutions (and your opinions on their merits).

Feature requests

Feature requests are welcome. But take a moment to find out whether your idea fits with the scope and aims of the project. It’s up to you to make a strong case to convince the project’s developers of the merits of this feature. Please provide as much detail and context as possible.

Pull requests

Good pull requests - patches, improvements, new features - are a fantastic help. They should remain focused in scope and avoid containing unrelated commits.

Please ask first before embarking on any significant pull request (e.g. implementing features, refactoring code), otherwise you risk spending a lot of time working on something that the project’s developers might not want to merge into the project.

For new Contributors

If you never created a pull request before, welcome :tada: :smile: Here is a great tutorial on how to send one :)

  1. Fork the project, clone your fork, and configure the remotes using command line:
# Clone your fork of the repo into the current directory
git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/<repo-name>

# Navigate to the newly cloned directory
cd <repo-name>

# Assign the original repo to a remote called "upstream"
git remote add upstream https://github.com/hoodiehq/<repo-name>
  1. If you cloned a while ago, get the latest changes from upstream:
git checkout master    git pull upstream master
  1. Create a new topic branch (off the main project development branch) to contain your feature, change, or fix:
git checkout -b <topic-branch-name>
  1. Make sure to update, or add to the tests when appropriate. Patches and features will not be accepted without tests. Run npm test to check that all tests pass after you’ve made changes. Look for a Testing section in the project’s README for more information.
  2. If you added or changed a feature, make sure to document it accordingly in the README.md file.
  3. Push your topic branch up to your fork:
git push origin <topic-branch-name>
  1. Open a Pull Request with a clear title and description.

For Members of the Hoodie Contributors Team

  1. Clone the repo and create a branch
git clone https://github.com/hoodiehq/<repo-name>
cd <repo-name>
git checkout -b <topic-branch-name>
  1. Make sure to update, or add to the tests when appropriate. Patches and features will not be accepted without tests. Run npm test to check that all tests pass after you’ve made changes. Look for a Testing section in the project’s README for more information.
  2. If you added or changed a feature, make sure to document it accordingly in the README.md file.
  3. Push your topic branch up to our repo
git push origin <topic-branch-name>
  1. Open a Pull Request using your branch with a clear title and description.

Optionally, you can help us with these things. But don’t worry if they are too complicated, we can help you out and teach you as we go :)

  1. Update your branch to the latest changes in the upstream master branch. You can do that locally with
git pull --rebase upstream master

Afterwards force push your changes to your remote feature branch.

  1. Once a pull request is good to go, you can tidy up your commit messages using Git’s interactive rebase. Please follow our commit message conventions shown below, as they are used by semantic-release to automatically determine the new version and release to npm. In a nutshell:

Commit Message Conventions

  • Commit test files with test: ... or test(scope): ... prefix
  • Commit bug fixes with fix: ... or fix(scope): ... prefix
  • Commit breaking changes by adding BREAKING CHANGE: in the commit body (not the subject line)
  • Commit changes to package.json, .gitignore and other meta files with chore(filenamewithoutext): ...
  • Commit changes to README files or comments with docs: ...
  • Cody style changes with style: standard

IMPORTANT: By submitting a patch, you agree to license your work under the same license as that used by the project.

Triagers

There is a defined process to manage issues, because this helps to speed up releases and minimizes user pain. Triaging is a great way to contribute to Hoodie without having to write code. If you are interested, please leave a comment here asking to join the triaging team.

Maintainers

If you have commit access, please follow this process for merging patches and cutting new releases.

Reviewing changes

  1. Check that a change is within the scope and philosophy of the component.
  2. Check that a change has any necessary tests.
  3. Check that a change has any necessary documentation.
  4. If there is anything you don’t like, leave a comment below the respective lines and submit a “Request changes” review. Repeat until everything has been addressed.
  5. If you are not sure about something, mention @hoodie/maintainers or specific people for help in a comment.
  6. If there is only a tiny change left before you can merge it and you think it’s best to fix it yourself, you can directly commit to the author’s fork. Leave a comment about it so the author and others will know.
  7. Once everything looks good, add an “Approve” review. Don’t forget to say something nice 👏🐶💖✨
  8. If the commit messages follow our conventions
  9. If there is a breaking change, make sure that BREAKING CHANGE: with exactly that spelling (incl. the “:”) is in body of the according commit message. This is very important, better look twice :)
  10. Make sure there are fix: ... or feat: ... commits depending on whether a bug was fixed or a feature was added. Gotcha: look for spaces before the prefixes of fix: and feat:, these get ignored by semantic-release.
  11. Use the “Rebase and merge” button to merge the pull request.
  12. Done! You are awesome! Thanks so much for your help 🤗
  13. If the commit messages do not follow our conventions
  14. Use the “squash and merge” button to clean up the commits and merge at the same time: ✨🎩
  15. Is there a breaking change? Describe it in the commit body. Start with exactly BREAKING CHANGE: followed by an empty line. For the commit subject:
  16. Was a new feature added? Use feat: ... prefix in the commit subject
  17. Was a bug fixed? Use fix: ... in the commit subject

Sometimes there might be a good reason to merge changes locally. The process looks like this:

Reviewing and merging changes locally

git checkout master # or the main branch configured on github
git pull # get latest changes
git checkout feature-branch # replace name with your branch
git rebase master
git checkout master
git merge feature-branch # replace name with your branch
git push

When merging PRs from forked repositories, we recommend you install the hub command line tools.

This allows you to do:

hub checkout link-to-pull-request

meaning that you will automatically check out the branch for the pull request, without needing any other steps like setting git upstreams! :sparkles: