How to Contribute

Contributing to Semester.ly follows the following simple workflow:

Fork the Repository

Follow the instructions in the installation portion of the documentation, see Installation

Make Changes (fix a bug, create a feature)

Add the Upstream Repo

You’re going to want to add the original project repo as an upstream repo in your forked project:

git remote add upstream git@github.com:noahpresler/semesterly.git

This way you can push to your fork as “origin” and the main repo as “upstream”. You’ll only ever do this once.

Syncing With Upstream

To stay up to date with upstream/master, you’ll consistently want to checkout the master branch, fetch the upstream changes. Merge these into your local master branch and push that merge. These lines do exactly that:

git checkout master
git fetch upstream
git merge upstream/master
git push origin master

Create a Working Branch

Now you’ll want to checkout a branch off master to work on. This is the branch you will merge into upstream when you are done. Just do:

git checkout -b mybranchname

Make Some Changes, Add and Commit

After you’ve made edits, git add your files, then commit. One way to do this:

git commit -a
git push origin mybranchname

Note

What If Upstream Has Changed? Just pull and rebase onto those changes and push. You may find conflicts, that’s to be expected!

git pull --rebase upstream master
git push origin mybranchname

Open a Pull Request (and see your code go live!)

So you’ve made your changes, and you’ve pushed them to your branch. To open a PR, simply head over to your fork at: https://github.com/YOURGITHUBUSERNAME/semesterly. Click on “Pull Request”, choose the upstream repo “master” as the destination, and your forked repo’s branch (the one you’ve been working on) as the source, and pick the merge and squash option!

Awesome! You’ve made a PR. Once its merged, your code will be a part of the Semester.ly open source GitHub repository and will be deployed for tens of thousands of students to use/benefit from.

Note

A PR must pass a few checks before it can be merged.

LGTM: Before your PR is merged, you’ll need to pass a peer review to ensure that all the changes are clean and high quality. Usually, you’ll get an “lgtm” (the comment which triggers this check to pass) or a few minor edits will be requested. This helps us maintain a quality code base and helps contrbutors learn and grow as engineers!

PR Body: Your pull request should reference a git issue if a related issue has been created. Additionally, it must provide an in depth description of why the changes were made, what they do, and how they do it. This message can be formatted as “WHY: ...., WHAT:....., HOW:.....”, but it can take any form if this does not suit your case.

Tests & Builds Pass: All tests and builds, as run by TravisCI must pass.

Linting Satisfied: All files must successfully pass our code style checks. You can check that your code has no errors by running:

npm run lint

You can learn more about how lint checking is done by reading Learning The Stack.