How to contribute

There are many ways to contribute to nodecg-io: logging bugs, submitting pull requests, reporting issues, and creating suggestions. You can also contribute to this documentation.

First you'll need an installation of nodecg-io. Please refer to the installation guide and create a development installation. The CLI asks you whether you want to clone the documentation. It's highly recommended that you do that and update the documentation as you add new services or features. To be able to create Pull Requests you should fork the corresponding repositories and add them as a remote (update URL for e.g., documentation repository):

git remote add fork https://github.com/[YOUR_USERNAME]/nodecg-io.git

Then you can create a new branch, do your changes, create commits and publish the branch to your fork using the following command:

git push fork my-branch

Build

VS Code

In Visual Studio Code you can start the build task with Ctrl + Shift + B (CMD + Shift + B on macOS). The incremental builder will do an initial full build.
The watch builder will watch for file changes and compile those changes incrementally, giving you a fast, iterative coding experience. It will even stay running in the background if you close VS Code. You can resume it by starting the build task with Ctrl + Shift + B (CMD + Shift + B) again.
You can kill the build task by pressing Ctrl + D in the task terminal (CMD + D) on macOS.
Errors and warnings will be shown in the status bar at the bottom left of the editor. You can view the error list using View | Errors and Warnings or pressing Ctrl + P and then ! (or CMD + P and ! on macOS).

Terminal

You can also use you terminal to build nodecg-io:

cd path/to/nodecg-io
npm run build

To do a full rebuild instead of just an incremental build you can use npm run rebuild.

The watch builder can be activated here too:

cd path/to/nodecg-io
npm run watch

Run

To test the changes you simply need to start/restart NodeCG.

Adding dependencies to packages

This project uses npm workspaces to manage our monorepo, and most importantly link all our packages together. Because of linking you should not use npm install xyz --save to add dependencies because npm can't get the development version of internal packages like nodecg-io-core. Doing so will result in an error and break the link. Instead, you should edit the package.json directly using a text editor and the run npm install in the repository root.

Open a Pull Request

Once you have implemented your feature or fixed a bug push it to your fork and start a Pull Request.

Merge Upstream Changes

Occasionally you will want to merge changes in the upstream repository (the official code repo) with your fork.

cd path/to/nodecg-io
git checkout main
git pull https://github.com/codeoverflow-org/nodecg-io main

Manage any merge conflicts, commit them, and then push them to your fork.

You may also occasionally need to merge upstream main in a pull request. To do that make the above to update your local main branch, and then merge your local main branch into your PR branch.

Where to Contribute

After cloning and building the repo, check out the issues list. Issues labelled help wanted are good issues to submit a PR for. Issues labelled good first issue are great candidates to pick up if you are in the code for the first time. If you are contributing significant changes, please discuss with the assignee of the issue first before starting to work on the issue. You may also contribute to this documentation.

Suggestions

We're also interested in your feedback. You can submit a suggestion or feature request through the issue tracker. To make this process more effective, we're asking that these include more information to help define them more clearly.

Discussion Etiquette

In order to keep the conversation clear and transparent, please limit discussion to English and keep things on topic with the issue. Be considerate to others and try to be courteous and professional at all times.