contributing.md

Contributing

👍🎉 First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute! 🎉👍

The following is a set of guidelines for contributing to this project. These are mostly guidelines, not rules. Use your best judgment, and feel free to propose changes to this document in a pull request. We're actively looking for folks interested in helping out and there are plenty of ways you can help!

Please take a moment to review this document in order to make the contribution process understandable 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 or assessing patches and features.

Code of Conduct

This project and everyone participating in it is governed by the Code of Conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. Please report unacceptable behavior to [email protected].

tl;dr

Note: Please don't file an issue to ask a question. You'll get faster results by using the resources below.

• Join the Slack Team
  • Even though Slack is a chat service, sometimes it takes several hours for community members to respond — please be patient!

What should I know before I get started?

[Pertinent information here.]

How Can I Contribute?

Reporting Bugs

This section guides you through submitting a bug report for this project. Following these guidelines helps maintainers and the community understand your report 📝, reproduce the behavior 💻, and find related reports 🔎.

Before creating bug reports, please check this list as you might find out that you don't need to create one. When you are creating a bug report, please include as many details as possible. Fill out the required template, the information it asks for helps us resolve issues faster.

Note: If you find a Closed issue that seems like it is the same thing that you're experiencing, open a new issue and include a link to the original issue in the body of your new one.

Before Submitting A Bug Report

• Check the debugging guide. [insert your guide here]
• Perform a cursory search to see if the problem has already been reported. If it has and the issue is still open, add a comment to the existing issue instead of opening a new one.

How Do I Submit A (Good) Bug Report?

Bugs are tracked as GitHub issues. Create an issue on the project repository and provide the following information by filling in the template.

Explain the problem and include additional details to help maintainers reproduce the problem:

• Use a clear and descriptive title for the issue to identify the problem.
• Describe the exact steps which reproduce the problem in as many details as possible. For example, start by explaining how you started the project. When listing steps, ot only don't say what you did, but also explain how you did it.
• Provide specific examples to demonstrate the steps. Include links to files or GitHub projects, or copy/pasteable snippets, which you use in those examples. If you're providing snippets in the issue, use Markdown code blocks.
• Describe the behavior you observed after following the steps and point out what exactly is the problem with that behavior.
• Explain which behavior you expected to see instead and why.
• Include screenshots and animated GIFs which show you following the described steps and demonstrate the problem. If you use the keyboard while following the steps, record a GIF. You can use this tool to record GIFs on macOS and Windows, and this tool or this tool on Linux
• If the problem wasn't triggered by a specific action, describe what you were doing before the problem happened and share more information using the guidelines below.

Provide more context by answering these questions:

• Did the problem start happening recently (e.g. after updating to a new version of the project) or was this always a problem?
• If the problem started happening recently, can you reproduce the problem in an older version of the project? What's the most recent version in which the problem doesn't happen?
• Can you reliably reproduce the issue? If not, provide details about how often the problem happens and under which conditions it normally happens.

Include details about your configuration and environment:

• Which version of the project are you using?
• What's the name and version of the OS you're using?
• Which keyboard layout are you using? Are you using a US layout or some other layout?

Suggesting Enhancements

This section guides you through submitting an enhancement suggestion for the project, including completely new features and minor improvements to existing functionality. Following these guidelines helps maintainers and the community understand your suggestion 📝 and find related suggestions 🔎.

Before creating enhancement suggestions, please check this list as you might find out that you don't need to create one. When you are creating an enhancement suggestion, please include as many details as possible. Fill in the template, including the steps that you imagine you would take if the feature you're requesting existed.

Before Submitting An Enhancement Suggestion

• Check the debugging guide [insert your guide here] for tips — you might discover that the enhancement is already available. Most importantly, check if you're using the latest version.
• Perform a cursory search to see if the enhancement has already been suggested. If it has, add a comment to the existing issue instead of opening a new one.

How Do I Submit A (Good) Enhancement Suggestion?

Enhancement suggestions are tracked as GitHub issues. Create an issue on that repository and provide the following information:

• Use a clear and descriptive title for the issue to identify the suggestion.
• Provide a step-by-step description of the suggested enhancement in as many details as possible.
• Provide specific examples to demonstrate the steps. Include copy/pasteable snippets which you use in those examples, as Markdown code blocks.
• Describe the current behavior and explain which behavior you expected to see instead and why.
• Include screenshots and animated GIFs which help you demonstrate the steps or point out the part of the project which the suggestion is related to. You can use this tool to record GIFs on macOS and Windows, and this tool or this tool on Linux.
• Explain why this enhancement would be useful to most of the users.
• Specify which version of the project you're using.
• Specify the name and version of the OS you're using.

Your First Code Contribution

Unsure where to begin contributing to this project? You can start by looking through these beginner and help-wanted issues:

• [Beginner issues][beginner] - issues which should only require a few lines of code, and a test or two.
• [Help wanted issues][help-wanted] - issues which should be a bit more involved than beginner issues.

Both issue lists are sorted by total number of comments. While not perfect, number of comments is a reasonable proxy for impact a given change will have.

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

Local development

This project can be developed locally. For instructions on how to do this, see the following sections in the readme.md.

Pull Requests

The process described here has several goals:

• Maintain the project's quality
• Fix problems that are important to users
• Engage the community in working toward the best possible project
• Enable a sustainable system for the project's maintainers to review contributions

Please follow these steps to have your contribution considered by the maintainers:

1. Follow all instructions in the template
2. Follow the styleguides
3. After you submit your pull request, verify that all status checks are passing
   What if the status checks are failing?

   If a status check is failing, and you believe that that is unrelated to your change, please leave a comment on the pull request explaining why you believe the the failing test is unrelated. A maintainer will re-run the status check for you. If we conclude that the failing test was a false positive, then we will open an issue to track that problem with our status check suite.

While the prerequisites above must be satisfied prior to having your pull request reviewed, the reviewer(s) may ask you to complete additional design work, tests, or other changes before your pull request can be ultimately accepted.

Styleguides

Git Commit Messages

• Use the present tense ("Add feature" not "Added feature")
• Use the imperative mood ("Move cursor to..." not "Moves cursor to...")
• Limit the first line to 72 characters or less
• Reference issues and pull requests liberally after the first line
• When only changing documentation, include [ci skip] in the commit title
• Consider starting the commit message with an applicable emoji:
  • 🎨 :art: when improving the format/structure of the code
  • 🐎 :racehorse: when improving performance
  • 🚱 :non-potable_water: when plugging memory leaks
  • 📝 :memo: when writing docs
  • 🐧 :penguin: when fixing something on Linux
  • 🍎 :apple: when fixing something on macOS
  • 🏁 :checkered_flag: when fixing something on Windows
  • 🐛 :bug: when fixing a bug
  • 🔥 :fire: when removing code or files
  • 💚 :green_heart: when fixing the CI build
  • ✅ :white_check_mark: when adding tests
  • 🔒 :lock: when dealing with security
  • ⬆️ :arrow_up: when upgrading dependencies
  • ⬇️ :arrow_down: when downgrading dependencies
  • 👕 :shirt: when removing linter warnings

Documentation Styleguide

• Use AtomDoc.
• Use Markdown.
• Reference methods and classes in markdown with the custom {} notation:
  • Reference classes with {ClassName}
  • Reference instance methods with {ClassName::methodName}
  • Reference class methods with {ClassName.methodName}

Example

// Public: Disable the package with the given name.
//
// * `name`    The {String} name of the package to disable.
// * `options` (optional) The {Object} with disable options (default: {}):
//   * `trackTime`     A {Boolean}, `true` to track the amount of time taken.
//   * `ignoreErrors`  A {Boolean}, `true` to catch and ignore errors thrown.
// * `callback` The {Function} to call after the package has been disabled.
//
// Returns `undefined`.
disablePackage: (name, options, callback) =>

Acknowledgements

This contributing.md file is adapted from Atom's contributing.md and HTML5 Boilerplate's contributing.md.