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Contributing

This guide covers our development workflow, coding standards, and how to get your changes merged.

Table of Contents

  1. Getting Started
  2. How to Contribute
  3. Code Quality Guidelines
  4. Submitting Changes
  5. Localization (i18n)
  6. Copyright Attribution

Getting Started

Useful Resources

Finding Issues to Work On

Note

We don't assign issues to individual contributors. You are welcome to work on any issue, and there's no need to ask first.

For more details see our FAQ

How to Contribute

Here's the typical contribution workflow:

  1. Find an Issue: Browse our issues or identify a bug/feature you'd like to work on
  2. Fork & Clone: Fork the repository and clone it to your local machine
  3. Set Up: Follow the installation guide to set up your development environment
  4. Develop: Make your changes following our code quality guidelines
  5. Test: Write tests for your changes and ensure all existing tests pass
  6. Commit: Write clear commit messages following our guidelines
  7. Submit a Pull Request: Create a pull request with a clear description of your changes

Code Quality Guidelines

Coding Style

We use Rubocop (for ruby files), ESLint (for javascript files), and ERB Lint (for erb templates) to help maintain consistency in our code. You can run these utilities during development to check that your code matches our guidelines:

bundle exec rubocop
bundle exec rails eslint
bundle exec erb_lint .

You can automatically fix many linting issues with:

bundle exec rubocop -a
bundle exec rails eslint:fix
bundle exec erb_lint . --autocorrect

Note

Use bundle exec rails eslint:fix instead of the standard eslint --fix option, which is silently ignored in this Rails project.

Tip

You can also install hooks to have git run checks automatically when you commit using overcommit with:

bundle exec overcommit --install

Testing

Important

Having a good suite of tests is very important to the stability and maintainability of any code base. The tests in the openstreetmap-website code are by no means complete, but they are extensive, and must continue to be so with any new functionality which is written. Tests are also useful in giving others confidence in the code you've written, and can greatly speed up the process of merging in new code.

When contributing, you should:

  • Write new tests to cover the new functionality you've added.
  • Where appropriate, modify existing tests to reflect new or changed functionality.

Warning

Never comment out or remove a test just because it doesn't pass.

You can run the existing test suite with:

bundle exec rails test:all

You can run javascript tests with:

RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec teaspoon

You can view test coverage statistics by browsing the coverage directory.

The tests are automatically run on Pull Requests and other commits via github actions. The results shown are within the PR display on github.

Tip

System tests use Selenium with Firefox for browser automation. On Ubuntu 24.04, if Firefox is installed via snap, you may need to override the Firefox binary path in config/settings.local.yml:

system_test_firefox_binary: /snap/firefox/current/usr/lib/firefox/firefox

Static Analysis

We also perform static analysis of our code. You can run the analysis yourself with:

bundle exec brakeman -q

Comments

Sometimes it's not apparent from the code itself what it does, or, more importantly, why it does that. Good comments help your fellow developers to read the code and satisfy themselves that it's doing the right thing.

When contributing, you should:

  • Comment your code where necessary - explain the bits which might be difficult to understand what the code does, why it does it and why it should be the way it is.
  • Check existing comments to ensure that they are not misleading.

Submitting Changes

Committing

When you submit your changes, the project maintainers have to read them and understand them. This is difficult enough at the best of times, and misunderstanding commits can lead to them being more difficult to merge. To help with this, when committing you should:

  • Split up large commits into smaller units of functionality.
  • Keep your commit messages relevant to the changes in each individual commit.

When writing commit messages please try and stick to the same style as other commits, namely:

  • A one line summary, starting with a capital and with no full stop.
  • A blank line.
  • Full description, as proper sentences with capitals and full stops.

Tip

Use the imperative verb form in your summary line (e.g., "Add feature" not "Added feature"). A good test is whether your summary line completes the sentence "This commit will...". For example: "This commit will Fix user login validation" or "This commit will Update README installation steps".

For simple commits the one line summary is often enough and the body of the commit message can be left out.

Pull Requests

If you have forked on GitHub then the best way to submit your patches is to push your changes back to GitHub and open a Pull Request on GitHub.

If your pull request is small, for example one or two commits each containing only a few lines of code, then it is easy for the maintainers to review.

Important

If you are creating a larger pull request, then please help the maintainers with making the reviews as straightforward as possible:

  • The smaller the PR, the easier it is to review. In particular if a PR is too large to review in one sitting, or if changes are requested, then the maintainer needs to repeatedly re-read code that has already been considered.
  • The commit history is important. This is a large codebase, developed over many years by many developers. We frequently need to read the commit history (for example using git blame) to figure out what is going on. So small, understandable, and relevant commits are important for other developers looking back at your work in future.

Tip

If you are creating a large pull request then please:

  • Consider splitting your pull request into multiple PRs. If part of your work can be considered standalone, or is a foundation for the rest of your work, please submit it separately first.
  • Avoid including "fixup" commits. If you have added a fixup commit (for example to fix a rubocop warning, or because you changed your own new code) please combine the fixup commit into the commit that introduced the problem. git rebase -i is very useful for this.
  • Avoid including "merge" commits. If your PR can no longer be merged cleanly (for example, an unrelated change to Gemfile.lock on master now conflicts with your PR) then please rebase your PR onto the latest master. This allows you to fix the conflicts, while keeping the PR a straightforward list of commits. If there are no conflicts, then there is no need to rebase anything.

Localization (i18n)

Important

If you make a change that involves the locale files (in config/locales) then please only submit changes to the en.yml file. The other files are updated via Translatewiki and should not be included in your pull request.

Copyright Attribution

The list of attributions on the /copyright page is managed by the OSMF Licensing Working Group (LWG).

Important

If you want to add another attribution, or make changes to the text of an existing attribution, please follow these steps:

  • First, contact the LWG to discuss your proposed changes.
  • If the LWG approves, please create a pull request with your proposed changes.
  • Finally, please ask the LWG to formally approve the wording used in the pull request (by having an LWG member comment on the PR).

When we have formal confirmation from LWG, we can go ahead and merge the PR.