How to contribute to xpm
This page is designed for developers who plan to contribute new features or fix bugs in the xPack Project Manager project and provides documentation on how to build and test the package.
Prerequisites
The xPack Project Manager is a portable Node.js project, and development can be performed on macOS, GNU/Linux and even Windows (although some npm scripts require bash).
The prerequisites are:
- node >= 18.0.0
- npm
To ensure compatibility with older node, preferably revert to an older one:
nvm use --lts 18
code
Get project sources
The project is hosted on GitHub:
The project uses multiple branches:
master
, with the latest stable version (default)development
, with the current development versionwebsite
, with the current content of the website; pushes to this branch automatically trigger publishes the main websitewebpreview
, with the current content of the preview website; pushes to this branch automatically trigger publishes the preview website
To clone the stable branch (master
), run the following commands in a
terminal (on Windows use the Git Bash console):
mkdir ~/Work/npm-packages && cd ~/Work/npm-packages
git clone https://github.com/xpack/xpm-js.git xpm-js.git
For development purposes, clone the development
branch:
mkdir ~/Work/npm-packages && cd ~/Work/npm-packages
git clone \
--branch development \
https://github.com/xpack/xpm-js.git xpm-js.git
Or, if the repo was already cloned:
git -C ~/Work/npm-packages/xpm-js.git pull
To contribute Pull Requests, fork the project and be sure the Copy the master branch only is disabled.
Use the xpack-development
branch and be sure you contribute the
Pull Requests back to the xpack-development
branch.
Satisfy dependencies
npm install
Add links for development
To facilitate the use of this module in other packages, add a link from the central npm storage to this local development folder:
npm link
And in the projects referring it:
npm link xpm
Start the compile background task
The TypeScript compiler can automatically recompile modified files. For
this, start it in watch
mode.
npm run compile-watch
Standard style
As style, the project uses ts-standard
, the TypeScript variant of
Standard Style,
automatically checked at each commit via CI.
// eslint-disable-next-line @typescript-eslint/no-xxx-yyy
The known rules are documented in the typescript-eslint project.
Generally, to fit two editor windows side by side in a screen, all files should limit the line length to 80.
/* eslint max-len: [ "error", 80, { "ignoreUrls": true } ] */
Known and accepted exceptions:
- none
To manually fix compliance with the style guide (where possible):
% npm run fix
> xpm@undefined fix
> ts-standard --fix src && standard --fix test
...
Documentation metadata
The documentation metadata uses the TypeDoc tags, without explicit types, since they are provided by TypeScript.
Microsoft is currently developing a new project (TSDoc) which tries to standardise TypeScript documentation metadata.
This standard is generaly compatible with TypeDoc; at the time of
this writing, among the visible differences is the lack
of the @category
or @group
tags.
Tests
The tests use the node-tap
framework
(A Test-Anything-Protocol library for Node.js, written by Isaac Schlueter).
Tests can be written in TypeScript, assuming ts-node
is also installed
(https://node-tap.org/docs/using-with/#using-tap-with-typescript)
As for any npm
package, the standard way to run the project tests is via
npm run test
:
npm install
npm run test
A typical test result looks like:
% npm run test
> xpm@undefined test
> npm run lint && npm run test-tap -s
> xpm@undefined lint
> standard
tests/tap/120-utils-global-config.js .................. 1/1 1s
tests/tap/130-utils-spawn.js .......................... 1/1 924ms
tests/tap/140-utils-xpack.js .......................... 2/2 1s
...
To run a specific test with more verbose output, use npm run tap
:
% npm run tap tests/tap/010-xxx.ts
...
Continuous Integration (CI)
The module is CI tested on every push via GitHub Actions, on Ubuntu, Windows and macOS, using node 18 and 20.
Tricks & tips
To trace TypeScript module resolution:
"compile": "tsc --traceResolution -p ./",