CONTRIBUTING.md

Development

Thanks for contributing! We want to ensure that urql evolves and fulfills its idea of extensibility and flexibility by seeing continuous improvements and enhancements, no matter how small or big they might be.

If you're about to add a new exchange, please consider publishing it as a separate package.

How to contribute?

We follow fairly standard but lenient rules around pull requests and issues. Please pick a title that describes your change briefly, optionally in the imperative mood if possible.

If you have an idea for a feature or want to fix a bug, consider opening an issue first. We're also happy to discuss and help you open a PR and get your changes in!

• If you have a question, try creating a GitHub Discussions thread.
• If you think you've found a bug, open a new issue.
• or, if you found a bug you'd like to fix, open a PR.
• If you'd like to propose a change open an RFC issue. You can read more about the RFC process below.

What are the issue conventions?

There are no strict conventions, but we do have two templates in place that will fit most issues, since questions and other discussion start on GitHub Discussions. The bug template is fairly standard and the rule of thumb is to try to explain what you expected and what you got instead. Following this makes it very clear whether it's a known behavior, an unexpected issue, or an undocumented quirk.

We do ask that issues aren’t created for questions, or where a bug is likely to be either caused by misusage or misconfiguration. In short, if you can’t provide a reproduction of the issue, then it may be the case that you’ve got a question instead.

If you need a template for creating a reproduction, all of our examples can be opened in isolated sandboxes or modified as you see fit: https://github.com/urql-graphql/urql/tree/main/examples

How do I propose changes?

We follow an RFC proposal process. This allows anyone to propose a new feature or a change, and allows us to communicate our current planned features or changes, so any technical discussion, progress, or upcoming changes are always documented transparently. You can find the RFC template in our issue creator.

All RFCs are added to the RFC Lifecycle board. This board tracks where an RFC stands and who's working on it until it's completed. Bugs and PRs may end up on there too if no corresponding RFC exists or was necessary. RFCs are typically first added to "In Discussion" until we believe they're ready to be worked on. This step may either be short, skipped, or rather long, if no plan is in place for a change yet. So if you see a way to help, please leave some suggestions.

What are the PR conventions?

This also comes with no strict conventions. We only ask you to follow the PR template we have in place more strictly here than the templates for issues, since it asks you to list a summary (maybe even with a short explanation) and a list of technical changes.

If you're resolving an issue please don't forget to add Resolve #123 to the description so that it's automatically linked, so that there's no ambiguity and which issue is being addressed (if any)

You'll find that a comment by the "Changeset" bot may pop up. If you don't know what a changeset is and why it's asking you to document your changes, read on at "How do I document a change for the changelog"

We also typically name our PRs with a slightly descriptive title, e.g. (shortcode) - Title, where shortcode is either the name of a package, e.g. (core) and the title is an imperative mood description, e.g. "Update X" or "Refactor Y."

How do I set up the project?

Luckily it's not hard to get started. You can install dependencies using pnpm. Please don't use npm or yarn to respect the lockfile.

pnpm install

There are multiple commands you can run in the root folder to test your changes:

# TypeScript checks:
pnpm run check

# Linting (prettier & eslint):
pnpm run lint

# Unit Tests (for all packages):
pnpm run test

# Builds (for all packages):
pnpm run build

You can find the main packages in packages/* and the addon exchanges in exchanges/*. Each package also has its own scripts that are common and shared between all packages.

# Unit Tests for the current package:
pnpm run test

# Linting (prettier & eslint):
pnpm run lint

# Build the current package:
pnpm run build

# TypeScript checks for the current package:
pnpm run check

While you can run build globally in the interest of time it's advisable to only run it on the packages you're working on. Note that TypeScript checks don't require any packages to be built.

How do I test my changes?

It's always good practice to run the tests when making changes. If you're unsure which packages may be affected by your new tests or changes you may run pnpm test in the root of the repository.

If your editor is not set up with type checks you may also want to run pnpm run check on your changes.

Additionally you can head to any example in the examples/ folder and run them. There you'll also need to install their dependencies as they're isolated projects, without a lockfile and without linking to packages in the monorepos. All examples are started using the package.json's start script.

How do I lint my code?

We ensure consistency in urql's codebase using eslint and prettier. They are run on a precommit hook, so if something's off they'll try to automatically fix up your code, or display an error.

If you have them set up in your editor, even better!

How do I document a change for the changelog?

This project uses changesets. This means that for every PR there must be documentation for what has been changed and which package is affected.

You can document a change by running changeset, which will ask you which packages have changed and whether the change is major/minor/patch. It will then ask you to write a change entry as markdown.

# In the root of the urql repository call:
pnpm changeset

This will create a new "changeset file" in the .changeset folder, which you should commit and push, so that it's added to your PR. This will eventually end up in the package's CHANGELOG.md file when we do a release.

You won't need to add a changeset if you're simply making "non-visible" changes to the docs or other files that aren't published to the npm registry.

Read more about adding a changeset here.

How do I release new versions of our packages?

Hold up, that's automated! Since we use changeset to document our changes, which determines what goes into the changelog and what kind of version bump a change should make, you can also use the tool to check what's currently posed to change after a release batch using: pnpm changeset status.

We have a GitHub Actions workflow which is triggered whenever new changes are merged. It will always open a "Version Packages" PR which is kept up-to-date. This PR documents all changes that are made and will show in its description what all new changelogs are going to contain for their new entries.

Once a "Version Packages" PR is approved by a contributor and merged, the action will automatically take care of creating the release, publishing all updated packages to the npm registry, and creating appropriate tags on GitHub too.

This process is automated, but the changelog should be checked for errors.

As to when to merge the automated PR and publish? Maybe not after every change. Typically there are two release batches: hotfixes and release batches. We expect that a hotfix for a single package should go out as quickly as possible if it negatively affects users. For release batches however, it's common to assume that if one change is made to a package that more will follow in the same week. So waiting for a day or two when other changes are expected will make sense to keep the fatigue as low as possible for downstream maintainers.

How do I upgrade all dependencies?

It may be a good idea to keep all dependencies on the urql repository up-to-date every now and then. Typically we do this by running pnpm update --interactive --latest and checking one-by-one which dependencies will need to be bumped. In case of any security issues it may make sense to just run pnpm update [package].

While this is rare with pnpm, upgrading some transitive dependencies may accidentally duplicate them if two packages depend on different compatible version ranges. This can be fixed by running:

npx pnpm-deduplicate
pnpm install

It's common to then create a PR (with a changeset documenting the packages that need to reflect new changes if any dependencies have changed) with the name of "(chore) - Upgrade direct and transitive dependencies" or something similar.

How do I add a new package?

First of all we need to know where to put the package.

• Exchanges should be added to exchanges/ and the folder should be the plain name of the exchange. Since the package.json:name is following the convention of @urql/exchange-* the folder should just be without this conventional prefix.
• All other packages should be added to packages/. Typically all packages should be named @urql/* and their folders should be named exactly this without the prefix or *-urql. Optionally if the package will be named *-urql then the folder can take on the same name.

When adding a new package, start by copying a package.json file from another project. You may want to alter the following fields first:

• name
• version (either start at 0.1.0 or 1.0.0)
• description
• repository.directory
• keywords

Make sure to also alter the devDependencies, peerDependencies, and dependencies to match the new package's needs.

The main and module fields follow a convention: All output bundles will always be output in the ./dist folder by rollup, which is set up in the build script. Their filenames are a "kebab case" (dash-cased) version of the name field with an appropriate extension (.esm.js for module and .cjs.js for main).

If your entrypoint won't be at src/index.ts you may alter it. But the types field has to match the same file relative to the dist/types folder, where rollup will output the TypeScript declaration files.

When setting up your package make sure to create a src/index.ts file (or any other file which you've pointed package.json:source to). Also don't forget to copy over the tsconfig.json from another package (You won't need to change it).

The scripts.prepare task is set up to check your new package.json file for correctness. So in case you get anything wrong, you'll get a short error when running pnpm after setting your new project up. Just in case! 😄

Afterwards you can check whether everything is working correctly by running:

pnpm install
pnpm run check

At this point, don't publish the package or a prerelease yourself if you can avoid it. If you can't or have already, we'll need to get the rights fixed by adding the package to the @urql scope. Typically what we do is:

npm access grant read-write urql:developers [package]