Contribute

Report bugs or request features

The easiest way to contribute to Comunica is by reporting the bugs your encounter, and requesting new features or enchancements.

Both of these should be done via GitHub issues. Make sure to be as descriptive as possible, and completely fill in the requested template.

Fix bugs or implement new features

If there is a certain bug that annoys you, or if you see the opportunity for a new feature that would make your life easier, you are welcome to contribute by submitting a pull request. Before you open a pull request, it is considered a good practise to first open an issue or discuss it with the community.

Don't know on what to get started? Have a look at issues tagged with the good-first-issue label or the dev-ready label. Issues tagged with good-first-issue are issues that should be implementable by new contributors. Issues tagged with dev-ready are potentially harder issues, but they are directly implementable without research.

When contributing, make sure to keep in mind the following:

• Read how to set up a development environment.
• Read the guide on contributing an actor.
• Commit messages:
  • Use descriptive, imperative commit message. These commit messages will be used as input for release changelogs. Have a look at the commit history for examples.
  • Commit messages should include a reference to relevant issues. For example, Closes #123, or Related to #456.
• Pull requests should pass all checks
  • Unit tests with 100% branching coverage (yarn test)
  • Clean code with passing linter (yarn run lint)
  • Code documentation
  • Pass all spec and integration tests
  • Signing the Contributor License Agreement
• Only add the files that are needed, so don't blindly do a git -a. (avoid adding editor-specific files)
• A good editor can make your life a lot easier. For example, WebStorm can be used for free with an academic license.
• All JSdoc can be found on https://comunica.github.io/comunica/

Tips and tricks:

• Only do yarn install in the repo root, and never in one of the sub-packages, as this can break your repo.
• yarn run build will (re)build all TypeScript to JavaScript and generate Components.js files. These can also be invoked separately via yarn run build:ts and yarn run build:components. These can also be executed on package-level.
• yarn run build-watch will continuously build TypeScript to JavaScript and generate Components.js files, which is useful during development. These can also be invoked separately via yarn run build-watch:ts and yarn run build-watch:components.
• yarn test and yarn run lint execute the tests and linter checks locally. Before a PR is opened, these must always pass, and testing coverage must be 100%.
• When editing configuration files in packages like query-sparql, yarn run prepare can be executed to compile the JSON files to JavaScript before they can be executed. (not needed when executing dynamically)
• When modifying a dependency package such as sparqlee, Yarn's link functionality can be used to force your local version of that dependency to be used in Comunica.

Write documentation

This website aims to provide detailed documentation on how to use and modify Comunica. If you see an opportunity for improving this documentation, fixing mistakes, or adding new guides, you are welcome to contribute via GitHub.

Create example code

The Comunica examples repository contains several example packages that modify Comunica, with details on how they are created and how they work. Anyone is more than welcome to contribute new example packages to this repository. For inspiration, you can have a look at the example requests.

Guidelines for core developers

The following guidelines only apply to people with push access to the Comunica repositories.

Branching Strategy

The master branch is the main development branch.

Releases are tags on the master branch.

All changes (features and bugfixes) must be done in a separate branch, and PR'd to master.

Recursive features must be PR'd to their parent feature branches, as a feature can consist of multiple smaller features.

The naming strategy of branches is as follows:

• Features: feature/short-name-of-feature
• Bugfixes: fix/short-name-of-fix

Issue Strategy

Issues should be assigned to people when possible, and must be progressed using the applicable GitHub project boards:

• Maintenance
• Development
• Documentation

General issues progress:

1. Triage: If the issue is not yet accepted or assigned.
2. To Do (3 levels of priority): When the issue is accepted and assigned, but not in progress yet.
3. In Progress: When the issue is being worked on by the assignee, or is under review.
4. Done: When the issue is resolved and reviewed. If attached to a PR, this can be merged, or closed otherwise.
5. On hold: If the issue is awaiting external input.

Merging Pull Requests

All PRs must pass the following checklist:

• All CI checks must pass. For unit tests, this includes 100% coverage, and coverage lines should not be skipped.
• The PR must be approved by at least 2 core maintainers.
  • If more than a week goes by, then the approval of 1 core maintainer is sufficient, unless another core maintainer explicitly indicated the desire for later review.
  • The codebase curator can always merge immediately.
• If commits don't meet the commit message guidelines from above, the "Squash and merge" functionality of GitHub must be used, and a new commit message must be created. Otherwise, PRs can be merged via the "Rebase" button.

Making a new release

Making a new release only requires invoking yarn run publish-release from the repository root, which does the following using lerna:

• Prompts your for providing the new version (major, minor, patch).
• Bump the versions from all changed packages.
• Generate a changelog from all commits since the last release. The process will halt until you modify (and save) the changelog where needed (remove unneeded commits, and categorize them), and confirm by pressing any key in the console.
• Release all changed packages to npm.
• Push the tag to GitHub.
• Push to master.

Making a new pre-release

Making a new release only requires invoking yarn run publish-canary from the repository root, which does the following using lerna:

• Temporarily do a patch release increment on all packages in the form of <version>-alpha.<git-head-sha>.0.
• Release all packages to npm with the next tag.
• Undo temporary changes

Pre-releases do not trigger changelog changes, git commits, and pushes.

If the lerna script exited with an error, you may notice some issues with git. In that case, make sure to execute the following:

git update-index --no-assume-unchanged $(git ls-files | tr '\\n' ' ') && git checkout .