This describes how developers may contribute to Revel.
Revel's mission is to provide a batteries-included framework for making large scale web application development as efficient and maintainable as possible.
The design should be configurable and modular so that it can grow with the developer. However, it should provide a wonderful un-boxing experience and default configuration that can woo new developers and make simple web apps straightforward. The framework should have an opinion about how to do all of the common tasks in web development to reduce unnecessary cognitive load.
Presently there are no versioning or compatibility guarantees in place, so the contribution process is not very formal.
For the greatest chance of success, start with an email to revel-framework@googlegroups.com to discuss your contribution idea and design.
Go uses the repository URL to import packages, so forking and go-getting the forked project will not work.
Instead, this is the recommended way:
- Fork Revel project on Github
- In your clone of github.com/robfig/revel, add your fork as a remote.
- Push to your fork to prepare a pull request.
Here is the command line:
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/robfig/revel # Change directory to revel repo
$ git remote add fork git@github.com:$USER/revel.git # Add your fork as a remote
$ git push fork master # After new commits, push to your fork
$ git pull origin master # Optionally, merge new changes from upstream
Set your editor to run "go fmt" every time you save so that whitespace / style comments are kept to a minimum.
Howtos:
Significant new features require tests. Besides unit tests, it is also possible to test a feature by exercising it in one of the sample apps and verifying its operation using that app's test suite. This has the added benefit of providing example code for developers to refer to.
Benchmarks are helpful but not required.
Typically running the main set of unit tests will be sufficient:
$ go test github.com/robfig/revel
Refer to the Travis configuration for the full set of tests. They take less than a minute to run.
The Revel web site is hosted on Github-pages and built with Jekyll.
To develop the site locally:
# Clone a second repository and check out the branch
$ git clone git@github.com:robfig/revel.git
$ cd revel
$ git checkout gh-pages
# Install / run Jekyll 1.0.2 to generate the site, and serve the result
$ gem install jekyll -v 1.0.2
$ jekyll build --watch --safe -d test/revel &
$ cd test
$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8088
# Now load in your browser
$ open http://localhost:8088/revel
Any changes you make to the site should be reflected within a few seconds.
These are outstanding feature requests, roughly ordered by priority. Additionally, there are frequently smaller feature requests or items in the issues.
- Better ORM support. Provide more samples (or modules) and better documentation for setting up common situations like SQL database, Mongo, LevelDB, etc.
- Support for other templating languages (e.g. mustache, HAML). Make TemplateLoader pluggable. Use Pongo instead of vanilla Go templates (and update the samples)
- Test Fixtures
- Authenticity tokens for CSRF protection
- Coffeescript pre-processor. Could potentially use otto as a native Go method to compiling.
- SCSS/LESS pre-processor.
- GAE support. Some progress made in the 'appengine' branch -- the remaining piece is running the appengine services in development.
- More Form helpers (template funcs).
- A Mongo module (perhaps with a sample app)
- Easy emailer support (e.g. to email exception logs to developer, or even to email users),
- Deployment to OpenShift (support, documentation, etc)
- Improve the logging situation. The configuration is a little awkward and not very powerful. Integrating something more powerful would be good. (like seelog or log4go)
- Cross-compilation in the "package" command.
- ETags, cache controls
- A module or plugins for adding HTTP Basic Auth
- Allowing the app to hook into the source code processing step