Welcome! This guide serves as the guideline to contributing to the Raiden WebUI codebase. It's here to help you understand what development practises we use here and what are the requirements for a Pull Request to be opened against WebUI.
There are two ways you can contribute to the development. You can either open an Issue or if you have programming abilities open a Pull Request.
If you experience a problem while using the Raiden WebUI or want to request a feature then you should open an issue against the repository. All issues should contain:
For Feature Requests:
- A description of what you would like to see implemented.
- An explanation of why you believe this would make a good addition to Raiden WebUI.
For Bugs:
- A short description of the problem.
- Detailed description of your system and environment (e.g. Raiden version, ethereum client etc).
- What was the exact unexpected thing that occurred.
- What you were expecting to happen instead.
If you have some coding abilities and would like to contribute to the actual codebase of Raiden then you can open a Pull Request(PR) against the repository.
If you are interested in contributing make sure that there is an issue about it. Express interest, by picking the issue so that core developers know that you are working on the issue.
All PRs should be:
- Self-contained.
- As short as possible and address a single issue or even a part of an issue. Consider breaking long PRs into smaller ones.
In order for a Pull Request to get merged into the main repository you should have one approved review from one of the core developers of Raiden and also all Continuous Integration tests should be passing and the CI build should be green.
Additionally you need to sign the raiden project CLA (Contributor License Agreement). Our CLA bot will help you with that after you created a pull request. If you or your employer do not hold the whole copyright of the authorship submitted we can not accept your contribution.
For frequent contributors with write access to the repository we have a set of labels to put on Pull Requests to signal to our colleagues what the current state of the PR is. These are:
- Dev: Please Review to a Pull Request that is currently ready for a reviewer to have a look at.
- Dev: Work in Progress to a Pull Request that is either not yet ready for review or is getting PR review suggestions applied by the author until it's ready for review again.
It is the responsibility of the author to ask for at least one person to review their Pull Request. That person should know the area of the code being changed. If the chosen reviewer does not feel confident in the review, they can then ask for someone else to additionally look at the code.
We have a lot of tools that automatically check the quality of the code (eslint, prettier). All these are automatically ran by the CI. Therefore fixes related to linting are not usually part of PR reviews. Additionally reviewers are encouraged to not be nitpicky about the suggested changes they ask from the PR author. If something is indeed nitpicky then the reviewer is encouraged to state it beforehand. Example:
nitpick: I don't really think XYZ makes sense here. If possible it would be nice to have it changed to KLM
The author of the PR can then choose to implement the nitpicks or ignore them.
PR authors should make pull request reviews easier. Make them as small as possible and even if some code is touched it does not mean that it needs to be refactored. For example don't mix style/typing changes with a big PR.
When a reviewer starts a PR review he should write a comment in the PR stating he is doing so. For example:
Reviewing this now
This is to keep track of who is reviewing a PR and to also know when a PR review is ongoing.
When performing a PR review of non trivial PRs it is recommended to clone the branch locally, explore the changes with your editor, run tests and experiment with the changes so that a better understanding of the code change can be achieved and good constructive feedback given back to the author.
These are the required external dependencies for development:
- Node >=10.13.0
- A running raiden node.
- Git for version control.
Start by getting the source code
git clone https://github.com/raiden-network/webui.git
cd raiden
All the required packages are available in community or extra:
sudo pacman -Sy nodejs npm base-devel git
Then install the required packages:
sudo apt-get install build-essential git libffi-dev libgmp-dev libssl-dev \
libtool pkg-config nodejs npm git
npm install --global yarn
The unit tests use karma and jasmine:
cd webui
yarn run testTests are split in unit tests, and integration tests. The first are faster to execute while the latter test the whole system but are slower to run.
By default whenever you make a Pull Request the linter tests, format checks, unit tests and all the integration tests will run.
For an exhaustive guide read this guide. It's all really good advice. Some rules that you should always follow though are:
- A commit title not exceeding 50 characters
- A blank line after the title (optional if there is no description)
- A description of what the commit did (optional if the commit is really small)
Why are these rules important? All tools that consume git repos and show you information treat the first 80 characters as a title. Even Github itself does this. And the git history looks really nice and neat if these simple rules are followed.
Code should be documented.
The code style is enforced by prettier which means that in most of the cases you don't actually need to do anything more than running the appropriate task.
To fix any fixable codestyle issue in either SDK or Wallet, you may just run the following command on the respective folder:
yarn run lintLinting plugins available for modern IDEs are also useful in early spotting any mistakes and help keep the code quality level.
There are some scenarios where prettier will break a template in a weird way:
<template
><section>
<div>
<div>
<div><p>paragraph</p></div>
</div>
</div>
</section></template
>In this case you should go and add line breaks so that the template appears in proper way.
<template>
<section>
<div>
<div>
<div><p>paragraph</p></div>
</div>
</div>
</section>
</template>When developing a feature, or a bug fix you should always start by writing a test for it, or by modifying existing tests to test for your feature. Once you see that test failing you should implement the feature and confirm that all your new tests pass.
Your addition to the test suite should call into the innermost level possible to test your feature/bugfix. In particular, integration tests should be avoided in favor of unit tests whenever possible.
Afterwards you should open a Pull Request from your fork or feature branch against master. You will be given feedback from the core developers of raiden and you should try to incorporate that feedback into your branch. Once you do so and all tests pass your feature/fix will be merged.
If you are a core developer of Raiden with write privileges to the repository then you can add commits or rebase to master any Pull Request by other people.
Let us take this PR as an example. The contributor has everything ready and all is looking good apart from a minor glitch. You can wait until he fixes it himself but you can always help him by contributing to his branch's PR:
git remote add hackaugusto git@github.com:hackaugusto/raiden.git
git fetch hackaugusto
git checkout travis_buildRight now you are working on the contributor's Pull Request. Make sure to coordinate to avoid any conflicts and always warn people beforehand if you are to work on their branch. Once you are done:
git commit -m 'Add my contribution
The PR was missing something. I added it.'
git push hackaugusto travis_buildCongratulations, you have added to someone else's PR!
When integrating a successful Pull Request into the codebase we have the option of using either a "Rebase and Merge" or to "Create a Merge commit". Unfortunately in Github the default option is to "Create a Merge commit". This is not our preferred option as in this way we can't be sure that the result of the merge will also have all tests passing, since there may be other patches merged since the PR opened. But there are many PRs which we definitely know won't have any conflicts and for which enforcing rebase would make no sense and only waste our time. As such we provide the option to use both at our own discretion. So the general guidelines are:
- If there are patches that have been merged to master since the PR was opened, on top of which our current PR may have different behaviour then use Rebase and Merge.
- If there are patches that have been merged to master since the PR was opened which touch documentation, infrastructure or completely unrelated parts of the code then you can freely use Create a Merge Commit and save the time of rebasing.