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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contributing to Electron Forge

Electron Forge is a community-driven project. As such, we welcome and encourage all sorts of contributions. They include, but are not limited to:

We strongly suggest that before filing an issue, you search through existing issues to see if it has already been filed by someone else.

This project is a part of the Electron ecosystem. As such, all contributions to this project follow Electron's code of conduct where appropriate.

Questions about usage

If you have questions about usage, we encourage you to visit one of the several community-driven sites.

Before opening bug reports/technical issues

Debugging

Troubleshooting suggestions can be found in the support documentation.

Contribution suggestions

We use the label help wanted in the issue tracker to denote fairly-well-scoped-out bugs or feature requests that the community can pick up and work on. If any of those labeled issues do not have enough information, please feel free to ask constructive questions. (This applies to any open issue.)

Running Forge locally

The easiest way to test changes to Forge during development is by symlinking your local packages to a sample Forge project.

To create symlinks your local Forge packages, use the yarn link:prepare command after building Forge.

yarn build
yarn link:prepare

Then, you want to initialize a new project with the electron-forge init command (which is the underlying CLI command for create-electron-app). To use the symlinks you created in the last step, pass in the LINK_FORGE_DEPENDENCIES_ON_INIT environment variable.

You can choose to run this command via your local build as shown below or run the production init for versions 6.0.1 and up.

LINK_FORGE_DEPENDENCIES_ON_INIT=1 node path/to/forge/packages/api/cli/dist/electron-forge-init.js my-app

Forge commands executed in your my-app sample project should reflect any changes in your local Forge build. (Make sure to run yarn build:fast or yarn build between code changes.)

Documentation changes

When changing the API documentation, here are some rules to keep in mind.

  • The first line:
    • should end with a period
    • should be in imperative mood (e.g., "Create" instead of "Creates")
    • First line should not be the function's "signature"
  • The first word of the first line:
    • should be properly capitalized
    • should not be "This"

For changes to the website (electronforge.io), please file issues/pull requests at its separate repository.

Changing the Code

An example of how to make your own code edits:

git clone https://github.com/electron/forge
cd forge
# Installs all dependencies
yarn
# Builds all the TS code
yarn build

Making Commits

Please ensure that all changes are committed using semantic commit messages.

Running the Tests

The Electron Forge repository has a lot of tests, some of which take a decent amount of time to run.

yarn test

Filing Pull Requests

Here are some things to keep in mind as you file pull requests to fix bugs, add new features, etc.:

  • GitHub Actions are used to make sure that the project builds packages as expected on the supported platforms, using supported Node.js versions, and that the project conforms to the configured coding standards.
  • Unless it's impractical, please write tests for your changes. This will help us so that we can spot regressions much easier.
  • If your PR changes the behavior of an existing feature, or adds a new feature, please add/edit the package's documentation.
  • Commit messages and pull request titles should adhere to the Conventional Commits format.
  • One of the philosophies of the project is to keep the code base as small as possible. If you are adding a new feature, think about whether it is appropriate to go into a separate Node module, and then be integrated into this project.
  • Please do not bump the version number in your pull requests, the maintainers will do that. Feel free to indicate whether the changes are a breaking change in behavior.
  • If you are continuing the work of another person's PR and need to rebase/squash, please retain the attribution of the original author(s) and continue the work in subsequent commits.

Release process

  • Make sure the tests pass with yarn test
  • Run git clean -fdx - this will ensure unneeded build files (and potentially sensitive files) are not included in the npm package.
  • Ensure that you are logged into npm via command line (npm login)
  • Run yarn lerna:publish, which will run the lerna publish command with a necessary set of flags.
    • The script will then ask you for your npm OTP password.
    • The script will commit the changes automatically. Run git log to confirm that the changes have been committed.
  • The command will have published your packages to npm, and pushed an appropriate tag to github.
  • After running the command, you should have a commit which:
    • Updates the version field in the package.json file
    • Updates the version fields in each of the submodule package.json files
  • Push your commit upstream to the main/default branch.
  • Create a new github release
    • Go to releases tab
    • Draft a new release and choose the appropriate tag
    • Target default branch
    • Generate release notes by copying in CHANGELOG.md contents into the release description or use GitHub's automatically generated release notes