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How to contribute to PWABuilder

Josh Sach edited this page Mar 15, 2022 · 9 revisions

Welcome

Welcome to the PWABuilder Contribution Guide. These pages are primarily intended for those who wish to contribute to the project by submitting bug reports, suggesting new features, commenting on new ideas, or even by submitting pull requests.

Please refer to the sidebar (on the right) for details on Contributing.

Code of Conduct

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact [email protected] with any additional questions or comments.

Contributing to PWABuilder

If you are not sure how you can contribute to the site, start with our issues. Issues labeled help wanted are good issues to submit a PR for. If you are contributing significant changes, please discuss with the assignee of the issue first before starting to work on the issue.

Once you are ready to do your first contribution, follow these steps to get setup for contributing code to the PWABuilder!

For more advanced topic, see the nav bar on the right.

Setup the development environment

Before cloning the repository, make sure you've installed the following prerequisites

Required (in this order)

Git (latest version)

Node.JS

npm

in your favorite shell, run npm install

Recommended

  • VS Code (or your favorite code editor)

Clone and build the project

  1. Clone the repository and navigate to the project root.

    > git clone https://github.com/pwa-builder/PWABuilder
    
    > cd PWABuilder
  2. Install all dependencies

    > npm install
  3. Build the project

    > npm build

NOTE it will take few minutes to install all dependencies and build the project

Developing

There are several ways to "run" the project and test your changes. All have pros and cons and you might find using a combination of these as you are developing and testing changes.

> npm start

The main start script will spin up a basic web server and open the browser pointing to the index.html in the root of the repo. This script will also start up the typescript compiler in watch mode which will reload the page as you are changing the code.

You can use index.html while developing and this is, for most scenarios, the fastest way to see your changes. However, please DO NOT commit any changes to this file unless you've already discussed this with the maintainers. We'd like to keep the index.html file simple and clean which makes it easier to use for debugging.

Git workflow

The PWABuilder team uses the GitHub flow where most development happens directly on the main branch. The main branch should always be in a healthy state which is ready for release. In general, you will use the main branch as the base for your Pull Requests unless a maintainer has specified a different branch.

If your change is complex, please clean up the branch history before submitting a pull request. You can use git rebase to group your changes into a small number of commits which we can review one at a time.

When completing a pull request, we will generally squash your changes into a single commit. Please let us know if your pull request needs to be merged as separate commits.

Submitting a pull request and participating in code review

Writing a good description for your pull request is crucial to help reviewers and future maintainers understand your change. Make sure to complete the pull request template to avoid delays. More detail is better.

  • Link the issue you're addressing in the pull request. Each pull request must be linked to an issue.
  • Describe why the change is being made and why you've chosen a particular solution.
  • Describe any manual testing you performed to validate your change.
  • Ensure the appropriate documentation has been added and linked to the Pull Request

Please submit one pull request per issue. Large pull requests which have unrelated changes can be difficult to review.

After submitting a pull request, core members of the project will review your code.

Often, multiple iterations will be needed to responding to feedback from reviewers.

Quality assurance for new features

When submitting a new Pull Request, we will be looking for the following items and may ask you to complete them before we can do a full review:

  1. Run npm build locally to make sure the build will not fail and any autogenerated code has been committed
  2. Test your feature in at least two browsers (Edge + 1 non-Chromium based browser)
  3. Update the documentation when necessary and link a documentation PR
  4. Follow the accessibility guidance for web development
  5. If introducing breaking changes, make sure to document those and describe why they are necessary. Keep in mind, any breaking changes will delay your feature until the next major release.