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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contributing

There are many ways to contribute to the Bot Framework Emulator project: reporting issues, submitting pull requests, and creating suggestions.

Submitting Issues

The Bot Framework Emulator project tracks issues and feature requests using GitHub issue tracker.

Before Submitting an Issue

First, please do a search in open issues to see if the issue or feature request has already been filed. If there is an existing issue, add your comments to that issue.

If your issue is a question, consider asking it on Stack Overflow using the tag botbuilder.

Writing Great Issues and Suggestions

  • Provide reproducible steps, what the result of the steps was, and what you would have expected to happen.
  • Always file a single bug or feature request per issue. Do not list multiple bugs or requests in the same issue.
  • Do not add your issue as a comment to an existing issue unless it's for the identical input. Many issues look similar, but have different causes.
  • Include a screenshot or animated GIF.

Don't feel bad if we can't reproduce the issue and ask you for more information!

How to build from source

Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/BotFramework-Emulator.git

Navigate to the project

cd BotFramework-Emulator

Install global dependencies

npm version 5.6.0 or greater is required.

npm i -g lerna@3.4.0 webpack@4.8.x webpack-cli jest

NOTE: If you are using Linux, building the Emulator might result in an error due to a missing package: libXScrnSaver. If you run into this error, install the package using your OS's package manager and retry:

yum install libXScrnSaver

Install local dependencies

lerna bootstrap --hoist

IMPORTANT: Do not run npm install in any of the directories; lerna will take care of that for you with the bootstrap command.

Build all packages

npm run build

How to run & develop locally

Open 2 terminals:

  • One in packages/app/client (will be responsible for the renderer process)

    • run npm run start
    • that's all you have to do; you shouldn't have to worry about the client side again unless you modify code in packages/app/shared and rebuild the shared package

  • One in packages/app/main (will be responsible for the node process)

    • run npm run start:watch
    • this starts a new instance of the electron app with the most recently compiled packages/app/main files, and will continue to watch for any changes before recompiling and restarting the electron instance

Debugging

The Main Process

Running npm run start:watch opens up port 7777 for debugging the main node process. Startup is non-blocking by default which means code could be executed before you have time to attach your debugger and set breakpoints. To prevent this, change --inspect=7777 to --inspect-brk=7777 in the start:electron script in the package.json located in packages\app\main. This will prevent code from running until after a debug process has been attached and will require you to start the debug process before the emulator is displayed.

Setting up a node debugger depends on your tooling. Please refer to the documentation on setting up a node debugger for your flavor of tools. For more information on debugging NodeJS in general, refer to this guide

The Client

Debugging the client is done remotely and can be done via your browser. Instructions will be different depending on your browser. Follow these instructions to debug the client side within Google Chrome:

  1. Open Google Chrome

  2. Navigate to the Inspect page by typing chrome://inspect in the address bar and pressing ENTER

  3. Tell Chrome to listen to localhost ports 7777 & 7778 by clicking the Configure button in the Devices section, and then typing localhost:7777 into the input and pressing enter. Do the same for localhost:7778. Now click Done.

  4. In the Remote Target section, you should now see an entry for localhost:3000 which is the webpack dev server serving the client side of the Emulator. Click Inspect to bring up the Chrome DevTools for the client side. Now you can debug the client as you would any other web app. (If you are unfamiliar with the Chrome DevTools, please take a look at their documentation.)

NOTE: If you are using Chrome, you might want to turn off Device Emulation / Screencast mode if you want to be able to mouse over UI elements and highlight them in the DevTools inspector. You can disable Screencasting by clicking the Toggle screencast button in the top left corner of the DevTools window.

Pull Requests

Before we can accept a pull request from you, you must agree to the Contributor License Agreement (CLA). It is an automated process and you only need to do this once.

To enable us to quickly review and accept your pull requests, always create one pull request per issue and link the issue in the pull request. Never merge multiple requests in one unless they have the same root cause. Keep code changes as small as possible. Avoid pure formatting changes to code that has not been modified otherwise.