Contributing

There are multiple ways that you can contribute to this project. In all of them, please make sure to be respectful of fellow users and developers.

Submitting an issue

The simplest way that you can contribute to this project is to submit a issue asking for a feature or reporting a bug fix.

TODO: bugfix template

For bugfixes, please make sure to include any relevant output from the cli or context issues.

For feature requests, a rationale behind need (ideally if you have a real world example) and then the proposed change in (at least) terms of how the user experience would go.

Developing a Feature or Fix

Documentation

This repository uses MkDocs to organize its instructional documentation. In general, you can simply update markdown edits for any feature that you're creating and they will be auto-generated into the correct github pages html files.

To get started with mkdocs, you can install the requisite dependencies via pip3 install -r docs/requirements.txt. Then you can run mkdocs serve, which will serve the rendered documentation site on localhost:8080.

This repository also uses typedoc to generate more rudimentary api documentation for the programmatic entrypoint of the library. That means that we expect appropriate TsDoc comments on any new classes, interface etc. so that users can find that information in the api section of the mkdocs site.

Extensions

This implementation of mkdocs uses the mkdocs material theme. This adds a lot of additional features. Some key features used by this project are Admonitions and Content Tabs. We welcome additional improvements to any documentation and visual style via other material features.

Additionally, we use mike for maintaining different versions of documentation. For the most part, this is something you don't need to worry yourself with, since we only allow our release process to build the new site versions. However, if you want to view your documentation with the version drop down, you can run:

mike deploy "local-version" latest --update-aliases
mike set-default latest
mike serve

Unlike with mkdocs serve, you will need to call mike deploy to synthesize any changes you make, so we recommend just using mkdocs serve but this is added for completeness.

Api Generation

yarn typedoc

Opening a PR

When opeing a PR from a fork, please link the issue that you are solving (and if one does not exist, please make one). Afterwards, please provide a description of the main file changes.

If you would like to contribute a fix or feature proposal, please fork the repo and...

Development setup

1. Ensure you are on node >=20 and that corepack is enabled: corepack enable
2. Explicitly run yarn install

Commit syntax

We make use of the angular commit syntax rules for commitlint.

Additionally, our release process uses semantic-release, because of this particular angular commits trigger a release:

Commit Subject	Version bump	Use for
feat	minor bump	use for all features that are new compared to previous functionaliy
fix	patch bump	use for all fixes to bugs or if there's a another need for a re-release
ci	no bump	use if just making improvements to ci processes
docs	no bump	use if updating documentation (that does not need to be submitted to npm)
build	no bump	if just updating build dependencies, typically for building that don't affect output code
test	no bump	for updates to just testing related code
* the rest	no bump	use as you see fit

Development Testing

Unit tests

We run unit tests through jest. New functionality should be accompanied by new tests for the paths that this logic creates.

// Alias for running jest
yarn test

// Example only running the named test file
yarn test import-resources-to-stack 

Our unit tests should mock all outbound client libraries and simply focus program logical paths.

Linting

We make use of biome to ensure formatting and additional lint rules.

You can run:

yarn lint --fix
yarn format --fix

To automatically change any immediately fixable problems and see the others reported.

Additionally, it is recommended that you integrate biome IDE support for better visibility while writing the code.

Typescript & SWC

We use typescript for typechecking and to compile types our projects to .d.ts. For compilation, we make use of swc since it is generally faster and also supports transpiling to full extensions for projects that are esm (as well as supporting commonjs transpilation more completely). Additionally, we use rspack for any binary commands that this library might create to bundle in libraries so that they are not subject to package version mismatch when running the cli commands.

Please keep in mind that while swc compiles typescript, it does not do strict type-checking and therefore we still need the regular typescript tool.

Be sure that your builds pass:

yarn build # this does all the build steps

# More granular steps
yarn build:esm # Transpiling to ESM files
yarn build:cjs # Transpiling to commonjs files
yarn build:bin # Packing of any bin files declared in the package.json
yarn build:types # Emitting type declaration files .d.ts

Optional - Testing built script locally

If you have made a change to a bin script and would like to test some local calls to the package as an installed package, you can do the following:

#In a shell that has yarn install
yarn build

# In a shell that is new
cd <out of the folder to avoid package.json reading>
npm install -g <path to project>

<bin script> <args>

You can run the install again and again after building.

Optional - Personal CI checks

Github allows public repos to run CI/CD for free on github actions. The pr-checks.yaml is set up to not require any specific secrets. If you would like to test your PRs before submitting them back to the main repo, it is recommended that:

1. You enable Github Actions
2. You disable the release job (that requires secrets specific to the package)
3. Run your PR against your main or alpha branch

Optional - Debugging

One way to debug runs of code in this project is through the VSCode javascript debugger terminal. The benefit of this debugger approach is that any javascript process that runs will automatically be run and available to debug. This means that running the integration test scripts from that terminal will also hit break points when the cli portion of the application is run.