Contributing to Coherence

Please take a moment to review this document in order to make the contribution process easy and effective for everyone involved! Also make sure you read our Code of Conduct that outlines our commitment towards an open and welcoming environment.

Using the issue tracker

Use the issues tracker for:

bug reports
submitting pull requests

We do our best to keep the issue tracker tidy and organized, making it useful for everyone. For example, we classify open issues per perceived difficulty, making it easier for developers to contribute to Coherence.

Bug reports

A bug is a demonstrable problem that is caused by the code in the repository. Good bug reports are extremely helpful - thank you!

Guidelines for bug reports:

Use the GitHub issue search — check if the issue has already been reported.
Check if the issue has been fixed — try to reproduce it using the master branch in the repository.
Isolate and report the problem — ideally create a reduced test case.

Please try to be as detailed as possible in your report. Include information about your Operating System, as well as your Erlang, Elixir, Phoenix, and Coherence versions. Please provide steps to reproduce the issue as well as the outcome you were expecting! All these details will help developers to fix any potential bugs.

Example:

Short and descriptive example bug report title
A summary of the issue and the environment in which it occurs. If suitable, include the steps required to reproduce the bug.
This is the first step
This is the second step
Further steps, etc.
<url> - a link to the reduced test case (e.g. a GitHub Gist)
Any other information you want to share that is relevant to the issue being reported. This might include the lines of code that you have identified as causing the bug, and potential solutions (and your opinions on their merits).

Feature requests

Feature requests are welcome and should be discussed with the issue tracker. But take a moment to find out whether your idea fits with the scope and aims of the project. It's up to you to make a strong case to convince the community of the merits of this feature. Please provide as much detail and context as possible.

Contributing Documentation

Code documentation (@doc, @moduledoc, @typedoc) has a special convention: the first paragraph is considered to be a short summary.

For functions, macros and callbacks say what it will do. For example write something like:

@doc """
Marks the given value as HTML safe.
"""
def safe({:safe, value}), do: {:safe, value}

For modules, protocols and types say what it is. For example write something like:

defmodule Phoenix.HTML do
  @moduledoc """
  Conveniences for working HTML strings and templates.
  ...
  """

Keep in mind that the first paragraph might show up in a summary somewhere, long texts in the first paragraph create very ugly summaries. As a rule of thumb anything longer than 80 characters is too long.

Try to keep unnecessary details out of the first paragraph, it's only there to give a user a quick idea of what the documented "thing" does/is. The rest of the documentation string can contain the details, for example when a value and when nil is returned.

If possible include examples, preferably in a form that works with doctests. This makes it easy to test the examples so that they don't go stale and examples are often a great help in explaining what a function does.

Pull requests

Good pull requests - patches, improvements, new features - are a fantastic help. They should remain focused in scope and avoid containing unrelated commits.

IMPORTANT: By submitting a patch, you agree that your work will be licensed under the license used by the project.

If you have any large pull request in mind (e.g. implementing features, refactoring code, etc), please ask first otherwise you risk spending a lot of time working on something that the project's developers might not want to merge into the project.

Please adhere to the coding conventions in the project (indentation, accurate comments, etc.) and don't forget to add your own tests and documentation. When working with git, we recommend the following process in order to craft an excellent pull request:

Fork the project, clone your fork, and configure the remotes:

# Clone your fork of the repo into the current directory
git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/coherence
# Navigate to the newly cloned directory
cd coherence
# Assign the original repo to a remote called "upstream"
git remote add upstream https://github.com/smpallen99/coherence

Pick a project to interactively see your Coherence changes:

Create your own project or use the Coherence Demo

Change the :coherence dependency in your project to a path directive like

  def deps do
    [
      {:coherence, path: "../coherence"}
    ]
  end

Get the new deps and remove the old build dir

mix deps.get coherence
rm -rf build/dev/lib/coherence

Now your project should be setup to your up your local changes every time you compile your project.

If you cloned a while ago, get the latest changes from upstream, and update your fork:
```
git checkout master
git pull upstream master
git push
```
Create a new topic branch (off of master) to contain your feature, change, or fix.
IMPORTANT: Making changes in master is discouraged. You should always keep your local master in sync with upstream master and make your changes in topic branches.
```
git checkout -b <topic-branch-name>
```
Commit your changes in logical chunks. Keep your commit messages organized, with a short description in the first line and more detailed information on the following lines. Feel free to use Git's interactive rebase feature to tidy up your commits before making them public.
Make sure all the tests are still passing.
```
mix test
```
Push your topic branch up to your fork:
```
git push origin <topic-branch-name>
```
If you modified the controllers in web/controllers/ you need to run a mix task to copy those files to priv/templates/coherence.install/controllers.
```
mix coherence.make_templates
```
Open a Pull Request with a clear title and description.
If you haven't updated your pull request for a while, you should consider rebasing on master and resolving any conflicts.

IMPORTANT: Never ever merge upstream master into your branches. You should always git rebase on master to bring your changes up to date when necessary.

   git checkout master
   git pull upstream master
   git checkout <your-topic-branch>
   git rebase master

Thank you for your contributions!

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