We are happy to see that you might be interested in contributing to Sequelize! There is no need to ask for permission to contribute. For example, anyone can open issues and propose changes to the source code (via Pull Requests). Here are some ways people can contribute:
- Opening well-written bug reports (via New Issue)
- Opening well-written feature requests (via New Issue)
- Proposing improvements to the documentation (via New Issue)
- Opening Pull Requests to fix bugs or make other improvements
- Reviewing (i.e. commenting on) open Pull Requests, to help their creators improve it if needed and allow maintainers to take less time looking into them
- Helping to clarify issues opened by others, commenting and asking for clarification
- Answering questions tagged with
sequelize.json StackOverflow - Helping people in our public Slack channel (note: if you don't have access, get yourself an invite automatically via this link)
Sequelize is strongly moved by contributions from people like you. All maintainers also work on their free time here.
Issues are always very welcome - after all, they are a big part of making Sequelize better. An issue usually describes a bug, feature request, or documentation improvement request.
If you open an issue, try to be as clear as possible. Don't assume that the maintainers will immediately understand the problem. Write your issue in a way that new contributors can also help (add links to helpful resources when applicable).
Make sure you know what is an SSCCE/MCVE.
Learn to use GitHub flavored markdown to write an issue that is nice to read.
It is essential that you provide an SSCCE/MCVE for your issue. You can use the papb/sequelize-sscce repository. Tell us what is the actual (incorrect) behavior and what should have happened (do not expect the maintainers to know what should happen!). Make sure you checked the bug persists in the latest Sequelize version.
If you can even provide a Pull Request with a failing test (unit test or integration test), that is great! The bug will likely be fixed much faster in this case.
You can also create and execute your SSCCE locally: see Section 5.
We're more than happy to accept feature requests! Before we get into how you can bring these to our attention, let's talk about our process for evaluating feature requests:
- A feature request can have three states - approved, pending and rejected.
- Approved feature requests are accepted by maintainers as a valuable addition to Sequelize, and are ready to be worked on by anyone.
- Rejected feature requests were considered not applicable to be a part of the Sequelize ORM. This can change, so feel free to comment on a rejected feature request providing a good reasoning and clarification on why it should be reconsidered.
- Pending feature requests are waiting to be looked at by maintainers. They may or may not need clarification. Contributors can still submit pull requests implementing a pending feature request, if they want, at their own risk of having the feature request rejected (and the pull request closed without being merged).
Please be sure to communicate the following:
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What problem your feature request aims to solve OR what aspect of the Sequelize workflow it aims to improve.
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Under what conditions are you anticipating this feature to be most beneficial?
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Why does it make sense that Sequelize should integrate this feature?
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See our Feature Request template for more details on what to include. Please be sure to follow this template.
If we don't approve your feature request, we'll provide you with our reasoning before closing it out. Some common reasons for denial may include (but are not limited to):
- Something too similar to already exists within Sequelize
- This feature seems out of scope of what Sequelize exists to accomplish
We don't want to deny feature requests that could potentially make our users lives easier, so please be sure to clearly communicate your goals within your request!
Please state clearly what is missing/unclear/confusing in the documentation. If you have a rough idea of what should be written, please provide a suggestion within the issue.
A Pull Request is a request for maintainers to "pull" a specific change in code (or documentation) from your copy ("fork") into the repository.
Anyone can open a Pull Request, there is no need to ask for permission. Maintainers will look at your pull request and tell you if anything else must be done before it can be merged.
The target of the Pull Request should be the main branch (or in rare cases the v5 branch, if previously agreed with a maintainer).
Please check the allow edits from maintainers box when opening it. Thank you in advance for any pull requests that you open!
If you started to work on something but didn't finish it yet, you can open a draft pull request if you want (by choosing the "draft" option). Maintainers will know that it's not ready to be reviewed yet.
A pull request should mention in its description one or more issues that is addresses. If your pull request does not address any existing issue, explain in its description what it is doing - you are also welcome to write an issue first, and then mention this new issue in the PR description.
If your pull request implements a new feature, it's better if the feature was already explicitly approved by a maintainer, otherwise you are taking the risk of having the feature request rejected later and your pull request closed without merge.
Once you open a pull request, our automated checks will run (they take a few minutes). Make sure they are all passing. If they're not, make new commits to your branch fixing that, and the pull request will pick them up automatically and rerun our automated checks.
Note: if you believe a test failed but is completely unrelated to your changes, it could be a rare situation of a flaky test that is not your fault, and if it's indeed the case, and everything else passed, a maintainer will ignore the flaky test and merge your pull request, so don't worry.
A pull request that fixes a bug or implements a new feature must add at least one automated test that:
- Passes
- Would not pass if executed without your implementation
Most operating systems provide all the needed tools (including Windows, Linux and MacOS):
-
Mandatory:
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Optional (recommended):
- Docker
- It is not mandatory because you can easily locally run tests against SQLite without it.
- It is practically mandatory if you want to locally run tests against any other database engine (MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres and MSSQL), unless you happen to have the engine installed and is willing to make some manual configuration.
- Visual Studio Code
- EditorConfig extension
- Also run
npm install --global editorconfigto make sure this extension will work properly
- Also run
- ESLint extension
- EditorConfig extension
- Docker
Clone the repository (if you haven't already) via git clone https://github.com/sequelize/sequelize. If you plan on submitting a pull request, you can create a fork by clicking the fork button and clone it instead with git clone https://github.com/your-github-username/sequelize, or add your fork as an upstream on the already cloned repo with git remote add upstream https://github.com/your-github-username/sequelize.
Run npm install (or yarn install) within the cloned repository folder.
Yarn v1 is used in the CI/CD pipeline so adding and updating dependencies must be done with Yarn v1. Depending on the Node version used, you might encounter a Found incompatible module error. To solve that, you can pass the --ignore-engines flag. This is not needed if you use Node ^14.17.0 || >=16.0.0.
If you're happy to run tests only against an SQLite database, you can skip this section.
If you have Docker installed, use any of the following commands to start fresh local databases of the dialect of your choice:
npm run start-mariadbnpm run start-mysqlnpm run start-postgresnpm run start-mssql
Note: if you're using Windows, make sure you run these from Git Bash (or another MinGW environment), since these commands will execute bash scripts. Recall that it's very easy to include Git Bash as your default integrated terminal on Visual Studio Code.
Each of these commands will start a Docker container with the corresponding database, ready to run Sequelize tests (or an SSCCE).
You can run npm run stop-X to stop the servers once you're done.
You can also easily start a local pgadmin4 instance at localhost:8888 to inspect the contents of the test Postgres database as follows:
docker run -d --name pgadmin4 -p 8888:80 -e 'PGADMIN_DEFAULT_EMAIL=test@example.com' -e 'PGADMIN_DEFAULT_PASSWORD=sequelize_test' dpage/pgadmin4
You will have to manually install and configure each of database engines you want. Check the dev/dialect-name folder within this repository and look carefully at how it is defined via Docker and via the auxiliary bash script, and mimic that exactly (except for the database name, username, password, host and port, that you can customize via the SEQ_DB, SEQ_USER, SEQ_PW, SEQ_HOST and SEQ_PORT environment variables, respectively).
Before starting any work, try to run the tests locally in order to be sure your setup is fine. Start by running the SQLite tests:
npm run test-sqlite
Then, if you want to run tests for another dialect, assuming you've set it up as written on section 3, run the corresponding command:
npm run test-mysqlnpm run test-mariadbnpm run test-postgresnpm run test-mssql
There are also the test-unit-* and test-integration-* sets of npm scripts (for example, test-integration-postgres).
While you're developing, you may want to execute only a single test (or a few), instead of executing everything (which takes some time). You can easily achieve this by modifying the .mocharc.jsonc file (but don't commit those changes!) to use spec (and maybe grep) from Mocha to specify the desired tests. Then, simply call DIALECT=some-dialect npx mocha from your terminal (example: DIALECT=postgres npx mocha).
Hint: if you're creating a new test, you can execute only that test locally against all dialects by adapting the spec and grep options on .mocharc.jsonc and running the following from your terminal (assuming you already set up the database instances via the corresponding npm run setup-* calls, as explained on Section 3a):
DIALECT=mariadb npx mocha && DIALECT=mysql npx mocha && DIALECT=postgres npx mocha && DIALECT=sqlite npx mocha && DIALECT=mssql npx mocha
What is SSCCE? find out here.
You can modify the sscce.js file (at the root of the repository) to create an SSCCE.
Run it for the dialect of your choice using one of the following commands:
npm run sscce-mariadbnpm run sscce-mysqlnpm run sscce-postgresnpm run sscce-sqlitenpm run sscce-mssql
Note: First, you need to set up (once) the database instance for corresponding dialect, as explained on Section 3a.
If you open the package.json file with Visual Studio Code, you will find a small debug button rendered right above the "scripts": { line. By clicking it, a popup will appear where you can choose which npm script you want to debug. Select one of the sscce-* scripts (listed above) and VSCode will immediately launch your SSCCE in debug mode (meaning that it will stop on any breakpoints that you place within sscce.js or any other Sequelize source code).
Sequelize follows the AngularJS Commit Message Conventions. The allowed categories are build, ci, docs, feat, fix, perf, refactor, revert, style, test and meta.
Example:
feat(pencil): add `graphiteWidth` option
Commit messages are used to automatically generate a changelog and calculate the next version number according to semver. They will be validated automatically using commitlint.
Then push and send your pull request. Happy hacking and thank you for contributing.
Have a look at our .eslintrc.json file for the specifics. As part of the test process, all files will be linted, and your PR will not be accepted if it does not pass linting.
For contribution guidelines for the documentation, see CONTRIBUTING.DOCS.md.