CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Dash Bootstrap Components

Looking to contribute something to Dash Bootstrap Components? Here's how you can help.

Please take a moment to review this document in order to make the contribution process easy and effective for everyone involved.

The developers of Dash Bootstrap Components work on this project in their spare time. Following these guidelines will help minimise the effort required to address your issue or assess your patches and features. Your help in making our lives easier is very much appreciated!

Using the issue tracker

The issue tracker is the preferred channel for bug reports, feature requests and submitting pull requests, but please respect the following restrictions:

• Please do not use the issue tracker for personal support requests. Stack Overflow (plotly-dash tag), or the Plotly Community Forum are better places to get help.

• Please do not derail or troll issues. Keep the discussion on topic and respect the opinions of others.

Bug reports

A bug is a demonstrable problem that is caused by the code in the repository. Good bug reports are extremely helpful, so thanks!

Guidelines for bug reports:

1. Use the GitHub issue search — check if the issue has already been reported.

2. Check if the issue has been fixed — try to reproduce it using the latest main or development branch in the repository.

3. Isolate the problem — ideally create a minimal working example that demonstrates the issue.

A good bug report shouldn't leave others needing to chase you up for more information. Please try to be as detailed as possible in your report. What is your environment? Which versions of dash and dash-bootstrap-components do you have installed? What steps will reproduce the issue? What browser(s) and OS experience the problem? Do other browsers show the bug differently? What would you expect to be the outcome? All these details will help us to fix any potential bugs. We have a bug report template you can use to ensure you don't miss out any of these details when filing a new bug report.

Feature requests

Feature requests are welcome. 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 project's developers of the merits of this feature. Please provide as much detail and context as possible. We have a feature request template you can use when filing a new feature request.

Pull requests

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

Please ask first before embarking on any significant pull request (e.g. implementing features, refactoring code, porting to a different language), 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 guidelines used throughout the project (indentation, accurate comments, etc.) and any other requirements (such as test coverage).

Adhering to the following process is the best way to get your work included in the project:

1. 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>/dash-bootstrap-components.git
   # Navigate to the newly cloned directory
   cd dash-bootstrap-components
   # Assign the original repo to a remote called "upstream"
   git remote add upstream https://github.com/facultyai/dash-bootstrap-components.git

2. If you cloned a while ago, get the latest changes from upstream:

   git checkout main
   git pull upstream main

3. Create a new topic branch (off the main project development branch) to contain your feature, change, or fix:

   git checkout -b <topic-branch-name>

4. Commit your changes in logical chunks. Please adhere to these git commit message guidelines or your code is unlikely be merged into the main project. Use Git's interactive rebase feature to tidy up your commits before making them public.

5. Locally merge (or rebase) the upstream development branch into your topic branch:

   git pull [--rebase] upstream main

6. Push your topic branch up to your fork:

   git push origin <topic-branch-name>

7. Open a Pull Request with a clear title and description against the main branch.

IMPORTANT: By submitting a patch, you agree to allow the project owners to license your work under the terms of the Apache 2.0 License.

Code guidelines

We use uv to manage the Python project, and just as a task runner. See their respective documentation for details on how to install. To manage the JavaScript package you will also need to install NodeJS.

Once you have installed uv, just and NodeJS, you can install required JavaScript dependencies with npm

npm install

Python code is linted using ruff, JavaScript code is linted using prettier. Run the linters with

just lint

You can alternatively lint just the Python or JavaScript source with

just lint-py
just lint-js

Many formatting issues can be fixed automatically by ruff or prettier respectively. Run them with

just format

Finally you can run the Python tests locally for a particular version of Python with

just python_version=3.10 test-py

and similarly for other versions. Run the JavaScript unit tests with

npm test
# or
just test-js

Run all tests with

just test

Building dash-bootstrap-components locally

First install JavaScript dependencies

npm install

Then build with

just build

License

By contributing your code, you agree to license your contribution under the Apache 2.0 license.