Contributing to Electrode Native

You can contribute to the Electrode Native open source project in several ways:

  • As an Electrode Native user, if you face any issue with the platform, you can open a new issue.

  • While reading the documentation, if you notice any typo (even a minor typpo ;), any misleading or wrong information or missing content, you can edit the documentation directly and issue a Pull Request. Using GitHub, this can be done online without having to fork the repository on your workstation.

  • If you want to suggest a new feature or an improvement for an existing one, you can create a new issue. Over time, we will create labels to easily classify issues.

  • In case you would like to use a native module that is not currently supported by Electrode Native, you can contribute a plugin configuration in the master manifest to add support for this native module. Check the documentation on Reusing existing native modules for more information.

  • By resolving an open issue. For this you'll have to setup your workstation accordingly to be able to work on the platform code, as explained below.

  • You can also contribute to the Electrode Native Bridge library.

Electrode Native development setup

If you want to contribute code to the Electrode Native platform, you'll first need to setup a development environment to work on Electrode Native. It's actually quite easy to start working on the platform.

1) If you have not already installed the platform, install by running the following command: 

 $ npm install -g electrode-native && ern

2) Fork the electrode-native repository to your GitHub user account and clone this fork on your workstation.

3) From your local working directory of electrode-native repository, run the following command:

$ node setup-dev

This little command takes care of installing all the needed dependencies for all Electrode Native modules, and creates a new local version 1000.0.0 of the platform.

4) Upon completion, use the following command to switch Electrode Native to this version: 

$ ern platform use 1000.0.0

Version 1000.0.0 is the development version and it points to your Electrode Native working folder.
This version is also taking care of running transpilation of the code on the fly, which means that any code modification you'll make to any of the modules will be immediately reflected when running any ern command.

With this setup, you can also use Electrode Native as any other non-developer user. You can install new released platform versions or even switch between versions.
The only difference with a regular user will be that you'll have access to version 1000.0.0 of the platform, which is the development version.

Guidelines for code contributions

Coding style

We are using Standard JS for our JavaScript code style rules.

If you want to see Standard warnings during development, you might consider configuring your JavaScript editor accordingly. Many editors have built-in support for Standard JS. Just check out their documentation regarding editor plugins.

You can also run Standard JS manually on Electrode Native through npm standard.

Electrode Native has a pre-commit hook setup, that runs standard for every commit. In case a commit is not meeting some standard rules, it won't go through. You'll have to fix the issue(s) first before being able to commit your changes.

Type checking

Electrode Native uses flow across all of its modules.

flow comes with integration support for many JavaScript editors. If you want to see flow errors from within your editor, please check the list of supported flow editors and configure your editor accordingly.

You can also run flow manually on Electrode Native using the npm flow command.

Electrode Native has a pre-commit hook setup, that will run flow for every commit. In case a commit contains some flow errors, it won't go through. You'll have to fix the error(s) first before being able to commit your changes.

Tests

Tests can be run by running the npm test command from the root of the electrode-native directory. Tests from all modules will be executed.

Our tests are written using mocha, chai and sinon.

The tests are not executed on every commit. Ideally, you should run the test suite before opening a PR.

Guidelines for documentation contributions

We are using GitBook for our documentation.

All our documentation pages are stored as markdown files withing the /docs directory.

If you need to make light edits to our documentation, such as simple rewording or fixing a few typos in a page, the simplest way is to just edit the page directly from GitHub. Just navigate to the page in our GitHub repository, or if you are looking at the documentation online, just click the Edit this page button in the top left corner of the page, which will take you to the page in GitHub.

From there, just click the Edit this file button and make your modifications. You can then select the option Create a new branch for this commit and start a pull request at the bottom of the page to automatically issue a Pull Request for your change.

In case you need to go through more heavy edits (reformatting, adding pages, adding images, working on templatized content -android v.s ios-), you might want to visualize your changes before actually opening a Pull Request, just to make sure the updated content is properly rendered by GitBook.

Thanks to the GitBook CLI, it is actually quite simple to setup a GitBook server locally, so that you can see how your changes will look like in the online documentation once processed by GitBook. Here are the steps:

1) Install the GitBook CLI 

$ npm install -g gitbook-cli

2) Install the GitBook plugins used for Electrode Native documentation. Make sure you’re in the electrode-native directory:

$ gitbook install

3) Run the GitBook server locally

$ gitbook serve

4) Navigate to http://localhost:4000 to view the GitBook with your changes

You can keep the server running. Any time you'll do a change in the documentation, the content will be automatically regenerated.

Continuous Integration

We are using Travis for our Continuous Integration (CI).

The CI job is run on every opened Pull Request (PR). It runs Standard JS and flow checks along with running the whole platform test suite.

We will only merge PRs that pass the CI (green status). Standard JS and flow checks are automatically run for you on every commit, so you should not have any surprise for these checks when it comes to the CI. However the tests are not automatically run on every commit, so before opening a PR please ensure that all tests are passing on your workstation by running the npm run test command.

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