First of all, welcome! Thank you for your interest in contributing to our framework.
There are many ways to get involved:
Have a question? Have you found a problem you would like to see fixed? Is there something you would like to see improved or features added?
Then we'd like to hear from you. Hop on to the issue tracker and create an issue. If you add a tag that best fits the problem, that would be absolutely awesome, checking if a similar issue already exists beforehand even more so.
If you happen to find an existing issue or a pull request that interests you, feel free to comment and upvote/downvote to give us your opinion (we do prefer comments over votes).
If submitting issues just doesn't cut it for you, we are always happy to see code contributions. Here are a few steps to get your code in as fast as possible:
The first step is to Fork this repository and clone your new fork. We also recommend adding the upstream as a new remote so you can easily get updates.
$ git clone https://github.com/<your user name>/vscode-extension-tester
$ cd vscode-extension-tester
$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/redhat-developer/vscode-extension-tester
Now that you have the code, you will need to build the project. First, we need to get all the modules linked and built.
$ npm run prepare-deps
Second step is to install all main module dependencies.
$ npm install
Now you can compile the typescript project. We recommend using the predefined script for that.
$ npm run build
After these steps, you should be able to run the project and make your changes. Just make sure to rebuild the project after changing the source files so you can test it.
When you make a change, make sure the tests are passing. In the test/test-project directory there is a dummy vscode extension we use to test the framework itself.
First we need to install the dependencies of this project. For that, you can use the following script
$ npm run prepare-test
With test dependencies installed we can launch the tests
$ npm test
If you are adding a new feature, be sure to write new tests for it. If you navigate to the test/test-project/src/test folder, you will find a test file structure that mirrors the source files. Put your new test into the appropriate existing file, or create a new one that follows the same structure.
Having made and tested your changes, we recommend committing them into a new branch:
$ git checkout -b my-new-branch
$ git add <changed files>
$ git commit -m <commit message>
$ git push origin my-new-branch
Now that the changes are in a branch in your fork, you can submit a new pull request.
If your pull request is intended to fix an issue in the tracker, make sure to link the two together. You can do that by adding for example fix #<issue number> to the commit message, or to any comment on the pull request.
Lastly, a pull request check on Travis is going to kick in whenever a change is pushed. Please make sure it ends up green. Otherwise it might need a change on your part. Or maybe it also needs a change on our part - in that case opening an issue is the best way to go.