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This document is intended to provide some information about how to contribute to the project, from basic sanity checks and code quality to information about how to structure git commits. These are the most common things that I encounter in pull requests sent to my projects.
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Contribution Guidelines
Table of Contents
This is a loose set of "guidelines" for contributing to my projects. Please note that I will not accept any pull requests that don't follow these guidelines.
Also consider the code of conduct. No really, you should.
Before making a change
Before making a change, consider your motivation for making the change. Documentation updates, bug fixes and the like are always welcome.
When adding a feature you should consider whether it is only useful for your particular use-case or whether it is generally applicable for other users of the project.
When in doubt - just ask me!
Commit messages
All commit messages should follow the style-guide used by the Angular project. This means for the most part that your commit message should be structured like this:
type(scope): Subject line with at most 68 a character length
Body of the commit message with an empty line between subject and
body. This text should explain what the change does and why it has
been made, *especially* if it introduces a new feature.
Relevant issues should be mentioned if they exist.
Where type can be one of:
feat: A new feature has been introducedfix: An issue of some kind has been fixeddocs: Documentation or comments have been updatedstyle: Formatting changes onlyrefactor: Hopefully self-explanatory!test: Added missing tests / fixed testschore: Maintenance work
And scope should refer to some kind of logical grouping inside of
the project.
Please take a look at the existing commit log for examples.
Commit content
Multiple changes should be divided into multiple git commits whenever possible. Common sense applies.
The fix for a single-line whitespace issue is fine to include in a different commit. Introducing a new feature and refactoring (unrelated) code in the same commit is not fine.
git commit -a is generally taboo.
In my experience making "sane" commits becomes significantly easier
as developer tooling is improved. The interface to git that I
recommend is magit. Even if you are not yet an Emacs user, it
makes sense to install Emacs just to be able to use magit - it is
really that good.
For staging sane chunks on the command line with only git, consider
git add -p.
Code quality
This one should go without saying - but please ensure that your code quality does not fall below the rest of the project. This is of course very subjective, but as an example if you place code that throws away errors into a block in which errors are handled properly your change will be rejected.
In my experience there is a strong correlation between the visual appearance of a code block and its quality. This is a simple way to sanity-check your work while squinting and keeping some distance from your screen ;-)
Builds & tests
Most of my projects are built using Nix to avoid "build pollution"
via the user's environment. If you have Nix installed and are
contributing to a project that has a default.nix, consider using
nix-build to verify that builds work correctly.
If the project has tests, check that they still work before submitting your change.
Both of these will usually be covered by Travis CI.