Source Code Contribution

NextGen encourages contribution of patches, documentation, and components from the community to the Mirth Connect open-source project. Contributions can take the form of code, documentation, testing, feedback, feature requests, bug fixes and specifications. This document details guidelines for contributing and integrating contributed artifacts.

Enhancements or bug fixes can be submitted by creating a Pull Request against the development branch. Each pull request should contain only one functional change. When making changes to more than one area of functionality, please submit one pull request for each.

1. Contributor Agreement

Review and sign a printed copy of the Contributor License Agreement

If you are contributing on behalf of a company or organization, an officer of your company must sign the CLA and indicate his or her title. The company can choose to list the specific individuals authorized to make contributions on the “Full Name” line, or may cover all employees with a blanket CLA by not limiting contributors to an authorized list. If necessary, the company may provide a list of authorized contributors in an attachment. The executive signing the CLA must be the first name on such an attached list, and this executive must sign the attachment as well. It may well be the case that your company already has signed a company-wide CLA with NextGen, so you should check first.

2. Create Pull Request

Use GitHub to create a new Pull Request against the development branch of Mirth Connect. The PR is then open for Mirth Connect developers to comment on and request additional changes if necessary. We can't promise a specific timeframe, but the development team will try to at least respond to the PR within a week.

Each pull request should contain only one functional change. When making changes to more than one area of functionality, please submit one pull request for each.

3. Make Additional Changes

The Mirth Connect development team may request additional changes for the PR. This could include small formatting changes or larger architectural decisions.

Once any necessary changes are made, push those commits as well so the PR gets updated.

4. Merge Into Development

If the pull request was approved, the NextGen team will pull it into their normal development cycle for quality assurance and code review. We may ask you to e-mail a signed copy of the CLA as well.

It may be several weeks before this can be done because of other priorities, but once we have approved the code changes internally we will then merge them into the development branch and push those changes back to the public GitHub project.

1. If your pull request is accepted for contribution, we will ask you to email us a signed copy of the CLA
2. We will include your contributions in the Mirth Connect open source project

If you are contributing on behalf of a company or organization, an officer of your company must sign the CLA and indicate his or her title. The company can choose to list the specific individuals authorized to make contributions on the “Full Name” line, or may cover all employees with a blanket CLA by not limiting contributors to an authorized list. If necessary, the company may provide a list of authorized contributors in an attachment. The executive signing the CLA must be the first name on such an attached list, and this executive must sign the attachment as well. It may well be the case that your company already has signed a company-wide CLA with NextGen, so you should check first.