Contributing
First off, thank you for considering contributing to TJ-Bot. 🎉
TJ-Bot is an open-source project, and we love to receive contributions from our community — you! There are many ways to contribute, from writing tutorials, improving the documentation, submitting bug reports and feature requests or writing code which can be incorporated into TJ-Bot itself.
Following these guidelines helps to communicate that you respect the time of the developers managing and developing this open-source project. In return, they should reciprocate that respect in addressing your issue, assessing changes, and helping you finalize your pull requests.
- Create issues for any major changes and enhancements that you wish to make, as well as for reporting any sort of bugs. For more light-hearted talks, you can use discussions. Discuss things transparently and get community feedback.
- Be welcoming to newcomers and encourage diverse new contributors from all backgrounds.
Unsure where to begin contributing to TJ-Bot? You can start by looking through these labels!
- good first issue - issues which should only require a few lines of code, and a test or two.
- help wanted - issues which should be a bit more involved than good first issues.
Let us know that you intend to work on the issue by commenting on it, and we will assign it to you.
Working on your first Pull Request? You can check these resources:
At this point, you're ready to make your changes! Feel free to ask for help; everyone is a beginner at first! 🎉
Before creating a new issue, make sure to search for existing issues first.
If the issue already exists, comment on it saying that you intend to work on it, and we will assign it to you!
In case it doesn't, feel free to open a new issue describing what you would like to change, improve or fix. The community will then discuss the issue, and assign it to you.
Now you are ready to do some work!
Then, you fork the repository.
The repository has two main branches:
-
master, a stable branch mostly used for releases that receives changes only occasionally -
develop, the branch where the active development takes place; receives changes frequently
Your work will be based off the develop branch.
To incorporate new commits from develop into your feature branch, use git pull --rebase or equivalent GUI action. We strongly prefer having linear history, and PRs with merge commits will have to be squashed before the merge, which results in losing all valuable commit history.
After your first contribution, you will be invited to the contributor team, and you will be able to work on the project directly, without a fork.
In that case, create a branch like this feature/name-of-your-feature, and push directly to the repo!
After a portion of feature you are working on is done, it's time to commit your changes!
Each commit should be small, self-contained, and should solve only one problem.
Each commit name and message should be clear, concise, and informative: Please consider checking these resources: writing a commit message and writing a good commit message
When you are done, you will create a pull request to request feedback from the rest of the community. At this point, your code will be automatically tested against our code guidelines (Spotless, SonarCloud, CodeQL, and more).
Each pull request should be clear, concise, and informative. Please consider checking these resources: writing a great pull request and unwritten guide to pull requests.
A pull request should only implement one feature or bugfix. If you want to add or fix more than one thing, please submit another pull request.
Once your code passed those checks and has been reviewed and accepted by at least two members of the community, you can merge it to the develop branch.
We require a linear history, that means you have two options to get your code merged:
-
squash, merges all your commits together into a single commit, which will then be merged into the project's history -
rebase, puts your changes aside, updates the original code base you worked with and then puts your changes back on top of it, all your commits will be preserved and land in the project's history
From there on, it will lead to an automatic re-deployment of the bot on a test environment, where you can test out your changes live.
After a while, the master branch will be synced with develop again, leading to your changes finally being live on the real server!
Make sure to head over to the Wiki as a general entry point to the project. It provides lots of tutorials, documentation and other information, for example
- creating a discord bot and a private server;
- setting up the project locally;
- adding your own custom commands;
- a technology overview;
- guidance about how to maintain the bot (e.g., VPS, logs, databases, restart).
You can chat with the TJ-Bot users and devs in our discord server!
Enjoy and have fun 👍