Contributing Open Source

Agora is currently under alpha development. We are now welcoming contributors to collaborate on the next Docusaurus.

The Open Source Guides website has a collection of resources for individuals, communities, and companies who want to learn how to run and contribute to an open source project. Contributors and people new to open source alike will find the following guides especially useful:

Get involved

There are many ways to contribute to Agora, and many of them do not involve writing any code. Here's a few ideas to get started:

  • Start using Agora! Go through the Getting Started guides. Does everything work as expected? If not, we're always looking for improvements. Let us know by opening an issue.
  • Take a look at the features requested by others in the community and consider opening a pull request if you see something you want to work on.

Contributions are very welcome.

Our development process

When a change made on GitHub is approved, it will be checked by our continuous integration system, Continue integration of gitlab.

Reporting new issues

When opening a new issue, always make sure to fill out the issue template. This step is very important! Not doing so may result in your issue not managed in a timely fashion. Don't take this personally if this happens, and feel free to open a new issue once you've gathered all the information required by the template.

  • One issue, one bug: Please report a single bug per issue.
  • Provide reproduction steps: List all the steps necessary to reproduce the issue. The person reading your bug report should be able to follow these steps to reproduce your issue with minimal effort.

Reporting bugs

We use GitLab Issues for our public bugs. If you would like to report a problem, take a look around and see if someone already opened an issue about it. If you a are certain this is a new, unreported bug, you can submit a bug report.

Working on Agora code

Semantic commit messages

See how a minor change to your commit message style can make you a better programmer.

Format: <type>(<scope>): <subject>

<scope> is optional

Example

feat: allow overriding of webpack config
^--^ ^------------^
| |
| +-> Summary in present tense.
|
+-------> Type: chore, docs, feat, fix, refactor, style, or test.

The various types of commits:

  • feat: (new feature for the user, not a new feature for build script)
  • fix: (bug fix for the user, not a fix to a build script)
  • docs: (changes to the documentation)
  • style: (formatting, missing semi colons, etc; no production code change)
  • refactor: (refactoring production code, eg. renaming a variable)
  • test: (adding missing tests, refactoring tests; no production code change)
  • chore: (updating grunt tasks etc; no production code change)

Use lower case not title case!

Code conventions

Style guide

Prettier will catch most styling issues that may exist in your code. You can check the status of your code styling by simply running npm run prettier.

However, there are still some styles that Prettier cannot pick up.

General

  • Most important: Look around. Match the style you see used in the rest of the project. This includes formatting, naming files, naming things in code, naming things in documentation.
  • "Attractive"

Documentation

  • Do not wrap lines at 80 characters - configure your editor to soft-wrap when editing documentation.

Pull requests

Your first pull request

So you have decided to contribute code back to upstream by opening a pull request. You've invested a good chunk of time, and we appreciate it. We will do our best to work with you and get the PR looked at.

Working on your first Pull Request? You can learn how from this free video series:

How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub

Proposing a change

If you would like to request a new feature or enhancement but are not yet thinking about opening a pull request, you can also file an issue with feature template.

If you're only fixing a bug, it's fine to submit a pull request right away but we still recommend to file an issue detailing what you're fixing. This is helpful in case we don't accept that specific fix but want to keep track of the issue.

Sending a pull request

Small pull requests are much easier to review and more likely to get merged. Make sure the PR does only one thing, otherwise please split it. It is recommended to follow this commit message style.

Please make sure the following is done when submitting a pull request:

  1. Fork the repository of the project you want to make change and create your branch from master.
  2. Add the copyright notice to the top of any code new files you've added. All pull requests should be opened against the master branch.

Test plan

A good test plan has the exact commands you ran and their output, provides screenshots or videos if the pull request changes UI.

  • If you've changed APIs, update the documentation.

Breaking changes

When adding a new breaking change, follow this template in your pull request:

### New breaking change here
- **Who does this affect**:
- **How to migrate**:
- **Why make this breaking change**:
- **Severity (number of people affected x effort)**:

Copyright header for source code

Copy and paste this to the top of your new file(s):

/**
* Copyright (c) Facebook, Inc. and its affiliates.
*
* This source code is licensed under the MIT license found in the
* LICENSE file in the root directory of this source tree.
*/

What happens next?

The core Agora team will be monitoring for pull requests. Do help us by keeping pull requests consistent by following the guidelines above.

License

By contributing to Agora, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under its MIT license.

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