There are several ways you can contribute to MapStore development. If you are a developer, you can provide new features and bug fixes, by using pull requests. But you can also help by:
- discovering and reporting bugs;
- improving documentation;
- helping others on the MapStore users mailing list or MapStore developers mailing list
- helping others on the GitHub issues.
Before reporting a bug on the project's issues page, first make sure that your issue is caused by MapStore, not your application code (e.g. passing incorrect arguments to methods, etc.). Second, search the already reported issues for similar cases, and if it's already reported, just add any additional details in the comments.
After you've made sure that you've found a new MapStore bug, here are some tips for creating a helpful report that will make fixing it much easier and quicker:
- Write a descriptive, specific title. Bad: Map does not show. Good: Doing X in Chrome causes Z.
- Include browser, OS and MapStore version info in the description.
- Create a simple test case that demonstrates the bug (e.g. using JSFiddle or JS Bin).
- Check whether the bug can be reproduced in other browsers.
- Check if the bug occurs in the stable version, master, or both.
- Bonus tip: if the bug only appears in the master version but the stable version is fine,
use
git bisectto find the exact commit that introduced the bug.
If you just want some help with your project, try asking on the MapStore users mailing list instead.
While we happily accept patches, we're also committed to quality. So bugfixes, performance optimizations and small improvements that don't add a lot of code are much more likely to get accepted quickly.
Before sending a pull request with a new feature, check if it's been discussed before already (either on GitHub issues or on the MapStore developers mailing list), and ask yourself two questions:
- Are you sure that this new feature is important enough to justify its presence in the MapStore core? Or will it look better as a plugin in a separate repository?
- Is it written in a simple, concise way that doesn't add bulk to the codebase?
If your feature did get merged into master, please consider submitting another pull request with the corresponding documentation update.
If you're not yet familiar with the way GitHub works (forking, pull requests, etc.), be sure to check out the awesome article about forking on the GitHub Help website — it will get you started quickly.
You should always write each batch of changes (feature, bugfix, etc.) in its own topic branch.
Please do not commit to the master branch, or your unrelated changes will go into the same pull request.
Your pull request must:
-
Follow MapStore's coding style.
-
Pass the integration tests run automatically by the Github Action - Continuous Integration system.
-
Address a single issue or add a single item of functionality. (Start the pull request title with the addressed issues if in case and #NUMBER_OF_ISSUE)
-
Contain a clean history of small, incremental, logically separate commits, with no merge commits.
-
Use clear commit messages.
-
Be possible to merge automatically.
It is strongly recommended that you run
npm test
npm run lint
before every commit. This will catch many problems quickly, and it is much faster than waiting for the CI integration tests to run.
The test build target runs a number of quick tests on your code.
The lint build target runs ESLint checks on your code.
The test files should in a folder named __tests__ in the module folder.
If you are testing a specific component follow the following convention:
- Component:
MyComponent.jsx - Test File:
MyComponent-test.jsx
MapStore follows a strict coding style, enforced by ESLint rules.
The set of used rules can be found in the ESLint config packageeslint-config-mapstore file, deployed on npm and configured in the package.json.
Additionally if you use VScode these are the extensions to install that will help notify lint errors on the fly
We suggest also to add the following configuration that will fix lint errors while saving the file (.vscode/settings.json)
"editor.codeActionsOnSave": {
"source.fixAll.eslint": true
},
You can run the linter locally on your machine before committing using the lint
target:
npm run lint
In addition, take care of adding the standard file header in each javascript / css added file, and update copyright years in modified ones.
This is the standard file header:
/**
* Copyright <year>, GeoSolutions Sas.
* All rights reserved.
*
* This source code is licensed under the BSD-style license found in the
* LICENSE file in the root directory of this source tree.
*/If possible, configure your editor to follow the coding conventions of the
library. A .editorconfig file is included at the root of the repository that
can be used to configure whitespace and charset handling in your editor. See
that file for a description of the conventions. The EditorConfig site links to plugins for various editors.
The integration tests contain a number of automated checks to ensure that the
code follows the MapStore style and does not break tests or examples. You
can run the integration tests locally using the test target:
npm test
Please submit separate pull requests for separate issues. This allows each to be reviewed on its own merits.
The commit history explains to the reviewer the series of modifications to the code that you have made and breaks the overall contribution into a series of easily-understandable chunks. Any individual commit should not add more than one new class or one new function. Do not submit commits that change thousands of lines or that contain more than one distinct logical change. Trivial commits, e.g. to fix lint errors, should be merged into the commit that introduced the error. See the Atomic Commit Convention on Wikipedia for more detail.
git apply --patch and git rebase can help you create a clean commit
history.
Reviewboard.org
and Pro GIT have
explain how to use them.
Commit messages should be short, begin with a verb in the imperative, and contain no trailing punctuation. We follow http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html for the formatting of commit messages.
Git commit message should look like:
Header line: explaining the commit in one line
Body of commit message is a few lines of text, explaining things
in more detail, possibly giving some background about the issue
being fixed, etc etc.
The body of the commit message can be several paragraphs, and
please do proper word-wrap and keep columns shorter than about
74 characters or so. That way "git log" will show things
nicely even when it's indented.
Further paragraphs come after blank lines.
Please keep the header line short, no more than 50 characters.
Occasionally other changes to master might mean that your pull request cannot
be merged automatically. In this case you may need to merge your branch with
more recent master, resolve any conflicts, and git push to update
your branch so that it can be merged automatically.
Please try to not rewrite the history of a pull request after the first review or it will be very hard for the reviewer to see if the required changes has been applied, expecially for big pull requests.
All MapStore objects (i.e. components, plugins, actions, reducers etc) should be properly documented in their JS documentation, please follow the required JSDoc syntax looking at the online documentation available in the JSDoc web site for more details.
Thank you for every contribution that helps to keep updated the MapStore's documentation.
At the end, however you decide to contribute to the project, your help is very welcome and we would like to thank you for doing it.