👍🎉 First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute! 🎉👍
The following is a set of guidelines, for contributing to Umbraco CMS.
These are mostly guidelines, not rules. Use your best judgement, and feel free to propose changes to this document in a pull request.
Remember, we're a friendly bunch and are happy with whatever contribution you might provide. Below are guidelines for success that we've gathered over the years. If you choose to ignore them then we still love you 💖.
Code of conduct
This project and everyone participating in it, is governed by the our Code of Conduct.
Table of contents
- Building Umbraco from source code
- Working with the source code
- Making changes after the PR is open
- Which branch should I target for my contributions?
- Keeping your Umbraco fork in sync with the main repository
This document gives you a quick overview on how to get started.
Not all changes are wanted, so on occasion we might close a PR without merging it. We will give you feedback why we can't accept your changes and we'll be nice about it, thanking you for spending your valuable time.
We have documented what we consider small and large changes. Make sure to talk to us before making large changes, so we can ensure that you don't put all your hard work into something we would not be able to merge.
Remember, it is always worth working on an issue from the Up for grabs list or even asking for some feedback before you send us a PR. This way, your PR will not be closed as unwanted.
It is your responsibility to make sure that you're allowed to share the code you're providing us. For example, you should have permission from your employer or customer to share code.
Similarly, if your contribution is copied or adapted from somewhere else, make sure that the license allows you to reuse that for a contribution to Umbraco-CMS.
If you're not sure, leave a note on your contribution and we will be happy to guide you.
When your contribution has been accepted, it will be MIT licensed from that time onwards.
Unsure where to begin contributing to Umbraco? You can start by looking through these Up for grabs issues
Great question! The short version goes like this:
- Fork - create a fork of
Umbraco-CMSon GitHub
- Clone - when GitHub has created your fork, you can clone it in your favorite Git tool
- Switch to the correct branch - switch to the
v9/contribbranch - Build - build your fork of Umbraco locally as described in building Umbraco from source code
- Change - make your changes, experiment, have fun, explore and learn, and don't be afraid. We welcome all contributions and will happily give feedback
- Commit - done? Yay! 🎉 Important: create a new branch now and name it after the issue you're fixing, we usually follow the format:
temp-12345. This means it's a temporary branch for the particular issue you're working on, in this case12345. When you have a branch, commit your changes. Don't commit tov9/contrib, create a new branch first. - Push - great, now you can push the changes up to your fork on GitHub
- Create pull request - exciting! You're ready to show us your changes (or not quite ready, you just need some feedback to progress - you can now make use of GitHub's draft pull request status, detailed here). GitHub has picked up on the new branch you've pushed and will offer to create a Pull Request. Click that green button and away you go.
The most successful pull requests usually look a like this:
- Fill in the required template (shown when starting a PR on GitHub), and link your pull request to an issue on the issue tracker, if applicable.
- Include screenshots and animated GIFs in your pull request whenever possible.
- Unit tests, while optional, are awesome. Thank you!
- New code is commented with documentation from which the reference documentation is generated.
Again, these are guidelines, not strict requirements. However, the more information that you give to us, the more we have to work with when considering your contributions. Good documentation of a pull request can really speed up the time it takes to review and merge your work!
You've sent us your first contribution - congratulations! Now what?
The pull request team can now start reviewing your proposed changes and give you feedback on them. If it's not perfect, we'll either fix up what we need or we can request that you make some additional changes.
We have a process in place which you can read all about. The very abbreviated version is:
- Your PR will get a reply within 48 hours
- An in-depth reply will be added within at most 2 weeks
- The PR will be either merged or rejected within at most 4 weeks
- Sometimes it is difficult to meet these timelines and we'll talk to you if this is the case.
To be honest, we don't like rules very much. We trust you have the best of intentions and we encourage you to create working code. If it doesn't look perfect then we'll happily help clean it up.
That said, the Umbraco development team likes to follow the hints that ReSharper gives us (no problem if you don't have this installed) and we've added a .editorconfig file so that Visual Studio knows what to do with whitespace, line endings, etc.
The Core Contributors team consists of one member of Umbraco HQ, Sebastiaan, who gets assistance from the following community members who have comitted to volunteering their free time:
These wonderful people aim to provide you with a first reply to your PR, review and test out your changes and on occasions, they might ask more questions. If they are happy with your work, they'll let Umbraco HQ know by approving the PR. Hq will have final sign-off and will check the work again before it is merged.
You can get in touch with the core contributors team in multiple ways; we love open conversations and we are a friendly bunch. No question you have is stupid. Any question you have usually helps out multiple people with the same question. Ask away:
- If there's an existing issue on the issue tracker then that's a good place to leave questions and discuss how to start or move forward.
- Unsure where to start? Did something not work as expected? Try leaving a note in the "Contributing to Umbraco" forum. The team monitors that one closely, so one of us will be on hand and ready to point you in the right direction.
In order to build the Umbraco source code locally, first make sure you have the following installed.
- Visual Studio 2019 v16.8+ (with .NET Core 3.0)
- Node.js v10+
- npm v6.4.1+ (installed with Node.js)
- Git command line
The easiest way to get started is to open src\umbraco.sln in Visual Studio 2019 (version 16.3 or higher, the community edition is free for you to use to contribute to Open Source projects). In Visual Studio, find the Task Runner Explorer (in the View menu under Other Windows) and run the build task under the gulpfile.
Alternatively, you can run build.ps1 from the Powershell command line, which will build both the backoffice (also known as "Belle") and the Umbraco core. You can then easily start debugging from Visual Studio, or if you need to debug Belle you can run gulp dev in src\Umbraco.Web.UI.Client. See this page for more details.
After this build completes, you should be able to hit F5 in Visual Studio to build and run the project. A IISExpress webserver will start and the Umbraco installer will pop up in your browser. Follow the directions there to get a working Umbraco install up and running.
Some parts of our source code are over 10 years old now. And when we say "old", we mean "mature" of course!
There are two big areas that you should know about:
- The Umbraco backoffice is a extensible AngularJS app and requires you to run a
gulp devcommand while you're working with it, so changes are copied over to the appropriate directories and you can refresh your browser to view the results of your changes. You may need to run the following commands to set up gulp properly:
npm cache clean --force
npm ci
npm run build
The caching for the back office has been described as 'aggressive' so we often find it's best when making back office changes to disable caching in the browser to help you to see the changes you're making.
- "The rest" is a C# based codebase, which is mostly ASP.NET MVC based. You can make changes, build them in Visual Studio, and hit
F5to see the result.
To find the general areas for something you're looking to fix or improve, have a look at the following two parts of the API documentation.
- The AngularJS based backoffice files (to be found in
src\Umbraco.Web.UI.Client\src) - The C# application
We like to use Gitflow as much as possible, but don't worry if you are not familiar with it. The most important thing you need to know is that when you fork the Umbraco repository, the default branch is set to something, usually v9/contrib. If you are working on v9, this is the branch you should be targetting. For v8 contributions, please target 'v8/contrib'
Please note: we are no longer accepting features for v7 but will continue to merge bug fixes as and when they arise.
If you make the corrections we ask for in the same branch and push them to your fork again, the pull request automatically updates with the additional commit(s) so we can review it again. If all is well, we'll merge the code and your commits are forever part of Umbraco!
We recommend you to sync with our repository before you submit your pull request. That way, you can fix any potential merge conflicts and make our lives a little bit easier.
Also, if you have submitted a pull request three weeks ago and want to work on something new, you'll want to get the latest code to build against of course.
To sync your fork with this original one, you'll have to add the upstream url. You only have to do this once:
git remote add upstream https://github.com/umbraco/Umbraco-CMS.git
Then when you want to get the changes from the main repository:
git fetch upstream
git rebase upstream/v9/contrib
In this command we're syncing with the v9/contrib branch, but you can of course choose another one if needed.
(More info on how this works: http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/5133345960/keeping-a-git-fork-updated)
We welcome all kinds of contributions to this repository. If you don't feel you'd like to make code changes here, you can visit our documentation repository and use your experience to contribute to making the docs we have, even better. We also encourage community members to feel free to comment on others' pull requests and issues - the expertise we have is not limited to the Core Contributors and HQ. So, if you see something on the issue tracker or pull requests you feel you can add to, please don't be shy.