vt-social/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Mastodon Glitch Edition

Thank you for your interest in contributing to the glitch-soc project! Here are some guidelines, and ways you can help.

(This document is a bit of a work-in-progress, so please bear with us. If you don't see what you're looking for here, please don't hesitate to reach out!)

Planning

Right now a lot of the planning for this project takes place in our development Discord, or through GitHub Issues and Projects. We're working on ways to improve the planning structure and better solicit feedback, and if you feel like you can help in this respect, feel free to give us a holler.

Documentation

The documentation for this repository is available at glitch-soc/docs (online at glitch-soc.github.io/docs/). Right now, we've mostly focused on the features that make this fork different from upstream in some manner. Adding screenshots, improving descriptions, and so forth are all ways to help contribute to the project even if you don't know any code.

Frontend Development

Check out the documentation here for more information.

Backend Development

See the guidelines below.

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You should also try to follow the guidelines set out in the original CONTRIBUTING.md from tootsuite/mastodon, reproduced below.

CONTRIBUTING

There are three ways in which you can contribute to this repository:

1. By improving the documentation
2. By working on the back-end application
3. By working on the front-end application

Choosing what to work on in a large open source project is not easy. The list of GitHub issues may provide some ideas, but not every feature request has been greenlit. Likewise, not every change or feature that resolves a personal itch will be merged into the main repository. Some communication ahead of time may be wise. If your addition creates a new feature or setting, or otherwise changes how things work in some substantial way, please remember to submit a correlating pull request to document your changes in the documentation.

Below are the guidelines for working on pull requests:

General

• 2 spaces indentation

Documentation

• No spelling mistakes
• No orthographic mistakes
• No Markdown syntax errors

Requirements

• Ruby
• Node.js
• PostgreSQL
• Redis
• Nginx (optional)

Back-end application

It is expected that you have a working development environment set up. The development environment includes rubocop, which checks your Ruby code for compliance with our style guide and best practices. Sublime Text, likely like other editors, has a Rubocop plugin that runs checks on files as you edit them. The codebase also has a test suite.

• The codebase is not perfect, at the time of writing, but it is expected that you do not introduce new code style violations
• The rspec test suite must pass
• To the extent that it is possible, verify your changes. In the best case, by adding new tests to the test suite. At the very least, by running the server or console and checking it manually
• If you are introducing new strings to the user interface, they must be using localization methods

If your code has syntax errors that won't let it run, it's a good sign that the pull request isn't ready for submission yet.

Front-end application

It is expected that you have a working development environment set up (see back-end application section). This project includes an ESLint configuration file, with which you can lint your changes.

• Avoid grave ESLint violations
• Verify that your changes work
• If you are introducing new strings, they must be using localization methods

If the JavaScript or CSS assets won't compile due to a syntax error, it's a good sign that the pull request isn't ready for submission yet.

Translate

You can contribute to translating Mastodon via Weblate at weblate.joinmastodon.org.