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Contributing

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Daniel Reeves edited this page May 9, 2020 · 10 revisions

We appreciate that you want to contribute to the Flagging project! There are various ways to contribute to the project, outlined in this document.

The vast majority of contributions to the Flagging site will be code contributions. If you would like to contribute to the Safe Water Project in general, which has more coding and non-coding opportunities to contribute, say hi in our Slack, join our Tuesday meetings, and talk to one of the Safe Water Project's coordinators at the meetings.

What to Contribute

For now, read the wiki page about our goals to get an idea of what we need, and join us on our Tuesday night meetings.

Once the website has an MVP, we will start utilizing the GitHub Issues and GitHub Probjects tabs in this repo to track work that needs to be performed.

How to Contribute Code

Our project follows a standard Git workflow. Until we have an MVP, we will be working on the master branch. Once we have an MVP, we will start branching out.

If this is your first time working on a collaborative project with Git, check out this handy First Contributions guide.

The basic outline for making contributions is:

  1. Fork the project to your Github: https://github.com/codeforboston/flagging/fork

  2. Clone the fork to your computer and add the upstream repo as a remote:

git clone https://github.com/<YOUR-USERNAME>/flagging.git
git remote add upstream https://github.com/codeforboston/flagging.git

  1. Checkout a branch. git checkout -b <my-branch-name> creates a new branch and checks that one out. If you're working on master (which we will do until we have an MVP), just do git checkout master.

  2. Make your changes! 😃 Make sure your code adheres to the Code Style Guide.

  3. Add the the document(s) you added/changed (git add <MY/DOC/PATH/HERE>) and then commit those changes (git commit -m "<DESCRIBE WHAT YOU DID>"), then push those changes to the

  4. On your Github fork, submit a pull request to the Code for Boston repo. (At the moment, there are no guidelines for submitting PRs, just make sure your PR descriptions are informative.)

  5. Ask someone on the Slack channel to review your pull request.

We will review pull requests and discuss them on Tuesday nights at the Code for Boston meetup.

Development Advice

I strongly recommend using a full-featured IDE for work on this project, as you'll likely want to have multiple terminals and py files open simultaneously. PyCharm and Visual Studio Code are two very good IDEs that work well to accommodate a web development workflow.

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