If you are reading this, you must be considering opening an issue for help with a bug, to suggest a new feature or help out with a Pull Request. Great!
To streamline this process, we've made this small document, to help you report your issue or feature more efficiently. We did our best to keep it brief, so please read it carefully.
Jump to the relevant section below:
Note: Please don't use our main GitHub repository for reporting bugs with extensions. If you have found a bug in an extension, the best place to report this would be in the extension's own repository, so that the original author can look into it.
- I'm reporting a bug
If you think you've found a bug, try to make sure it's actually a bug, and not the result of something else going wrong. For example, make sure your webserver is functioning correctly, and try the issue in another browser, if possible. Be sure to search for similar bugs. Perhaps somebody has already reported the issue. If so, you should add any additional information to the existing bug. It might make it easier for us to fix, and at the very least it'll get bumped higher onto the list.
After you've done these things, and you are fairly certain you've found a new bug, please open an issue to report it. Create a GitHub account, if you don't have one yet.
When posting your bug, please include the following:
- Bug summary: Write a short summary of the bug. Try to pinpoint it as much a possible. Try to state the actual problem, and not just what you think the solution might be.
- Specifics: Mention the URL where this bug occurs, if applicable. What version of Bolt are you using (down to the very last digit!), and what method did you use to install it? What browser and version are you using? Please mention if you've checked it in other browsers as well.
- Steps to reproduce: Clearly mention the steps to reproduce the bug.
- Expected result: What did you expect that would happen on your Bolt site? Describe the intended outcome after you did the steps mentioned before.
- Actual result: What is the actual result of the above steps? So, describe the behavior of the bug. Please, please include Error messages and screenshots. They might mean nothing to you, but they are very helpful to us.
Further reading: 10 tips for better Pull Requests
If you wish to contact us privately about any possible security issues in Bolt, please contact us at security@bolt.cm. Your email will be handled confidentially. After fixing them, you will be credited for any security issues that you may have discovered.
- I'd like to request/propose a feature
We get a lot of feature requests for Bolt, and we can't do them all, even if we wanted to. In fact, since Bolt is designed to be 'simple, sophisticated and straightforward', not all feature requests might be a good fit for Bolt. Be sure to read our manifesto to get an idea of our goals and values.
If you're proposing an idea, with the intent to work on it yourself, please open
an issue with a title like [RFC] Wouldn't it be swell, if we had [X]?. That
will make it obvious that you're open for discussion about the feature, and that
it'll be a good fit for Bolt itself, or that it might be better suited as an
extension. If you want to discuss your idea first, before 'officially' posting
it, you can always join us on IRC.
On the other hand, if you have a suggestion for a cool new feature, but don't have the skill to work on it yourself, we'll gladly read it, and comment on it, but we can't make any promises as to when/if it'll be realised.
- I'm making a pull request
Your contributions to the project are very welcome. If you would like to fix a bug or implement a proposed feature, you can submit a Pull Request. To help us merge your Pull Request, please make sure you follow these points:
- Describe the problem clearly in the Pull Request description.
- Please refer to a bug report on the issue list. An example of a good title is "Fixes problem [x] by doing [y]. Fixes #1555"
- If you're doing a PR for a non-trivial new feature, please make an
RFCissue first, as described above. - Do not edit compiled asset files such as
bolt.jsorbolt.css. Instead, edit the source javascript and Sass files inside the/app/src/directory. We'll handle the updated compiled files. - For any change that you make, please try to also add a test case(s) in
the
testsdirectory.
Make sure you read our guide on Contributing to Bolt, the page on Code Quality and the page describing our Release process.
Further reading:
Thank you for your contributions!
And finally, one last tip: Mention that you do not like brown M&M's. If you do, we'll know you've read this page. ;-)