Contributing for the first time

[letmeadam]

Hello,

I'm new to Clojure development but I really like the feeling of this VTT so far. I'd like to try developing new features (either on a local/fork or even contributing to the main repo/branch).

I have a few general questions:

• If you were to pick an entry point into adding/editing features on the app-side, where would you suggest?
  • Are there any "low hanging fruit" features that might be a simple starting point?
• Are there any Clojure standards or guidelines you're trying to stick to—or if you have any key resources to review, I'd appreciate any help in that direction.

I'd also be happy to contribute to any documentation along the way, if interested.

Thanks
~ Adam

[samcf]

Hi @letmeadam! Thanks for your interest. Give me a day to create a beginner friendly task for you; I'll add a reply in this thread when I've made it.

[samcf]

#178 is an issue about styling drag and drop areas of token images to make it more obvious about what will happen if you release a token over those areas. Right now there is really nothing that informs the user about what will happen.

[samcf]

As far as coding standards, I try to make sure my code is formatted according to cljfmt and that there are no warnings or errors clj-kondo. Both are baked into the Calva extension for VSCode, if you happen to use that editor.

[letmeadam]

Awesome! This sounds like a good intro-task, thank you!

I've gotten started with VSCode and the Calva extension, but I'm having difficulty getting any changes to show through for my local, development build.

---

Would you be able to point me in the right direction and/or post a quick video for how you start up and reload with the hot-reloading? Here's what I'm doing now that doesn't seem to work:

1. I've set the MODE to watch in the docker-compose.yaml
2. Ran docker compose watch without changing the ports/address
   • From here I can access my local version at 127.0.0.1:8080 and see the same pages as orges.app
3. Now I can try to make visible changes (i.e. trying to change the "Upload images" to "Test 1 2 3" in panel_tokens.cljs line 452) but reloading my browser doesn't pick up the changes
   • I saw Calva has a "jack-in" step. I've tried to run those with the "shadow-cljs" and "deps.edn + shadow-cljs" options, but I seem to run into an issue where it can't connect to the shadow-cljs runtimes... does that sound right?

Here's what I see in the VSCode terminal when I attempt to "jack-in" with Calva:

   Process shell is: true
⚡️ Starting the REPL ⚡️ using the below command line:
(cd /Users/letmeadam/git/ogres; npx shadow-cljs -d cider/cider-nrepl:0.52.1 watch :app)
shadow-cljs - config: /Users/letmeadam/git/ogres/shadow-cljs.edn
shadow-cljs - starting via "clojure"
[2025-03-19 18:48:13.015 - WARNING] TCP Port 9630 in use.
[2025-03-19 18:48:14.985 - WARNING] TCP Port 8080 in use.
shadow-cljs - HTTP server available at http://localhost:8081
shadow-cljs - server version: 2.23.3 running at http://localhost:9631
shadow-cljs - nREPL server started on port 59429
shadow-cljs - watching build :app
[:app] Configuring build.
[:app] Compiling ...
[:app] Build completed. (257 files, 2 compiled, 0 warnings, 2.66s)

And VSCode/Calva just shows this spinning forever in a pop-up:

Waiting for shadow-cljs runtimes...: Please start your ClojureScript app...

[letmeadam]

Ok, I got hot-reloading working 🎉 —I didn't realize that I was using the latest instead of the dev version (so 127.0.0.1:8080/play?r=dev showed me my development version... which I now see I hadn't understood from the top of the development docs)

Right now I'm facing the /play?r=dev endpoint without any CSS though... any ideas what I'm missing?

[letmeadam]

Update: I was able to get the CSS loading by starting the npm run style before launching the dev docker containers. 🎉

For now I'm up an running and can make progresson #178, but I can't seem to get the CSS to "hot-reload" properly—which may be a bit early and not yet necessary. Instead, I have to close everything down and restart it—sometimes without success. Is there a simpler way to clear/refresh the stylesheets for my local dev builds?

[samcf]

Personally I don't use the Docker image for development -- I just run the three commands in different terminal tabs. There is probably a way to get styles to hot-reload in the Docker environment, I'm just not that familiar with it.