CONTRIBUTING.md

Modular structure

Tokamak is built with modularity in mind, providing a multi-platform TokamakCore module and separate modules for platform-specific renderers. Currently, the only available renderer modules are TokamakDOM and TokamakStaticHTML, the latter can be used for static websites and server-side rendering. If you'd like to implement your own custom renderer, please refer to our renderers guide for more details.

Tokamak users only need to import a renderer module they would like to use, while TokamakCore is hidden as an "internal" Tokamak package target. Unfortunately, Swift does not allow us to specify that certain symbols in TokamakCore are private to a package, but they need to stay public for renderer modules to get access to them. Thus, the current workaround is to mark those symbols with underscores in their names to indicate this. It can be formulated as these "rules":

1. If a symbol is restricted to a module and has no public access control, no need for an underscore.
2. If a symbol is part of a public renderer module API (e.g. TokamakDOM), no need for an underscore, users may use those symbols directly, and it is re-exported from TokamakCore by the renderer module via public typealias.
3. If a function or a type have public on them only by necessity to make them available in TokamakDOM, but unavailable to users (or not intended for public use), underscore is needed to indicate that.

The benefit of separate modules is that they allow us to provide separate renderers for different platforms. Users can pick and choose what they want to use, e.g. purely static websites would use only TokamakStaticHTML, single-page apps would use TokamakDOM, maybe in conjuction with TokamakStaticHTML for pre-rendering. As we'd like to try to implement a native renderer for Android at some point, probably in a separate TokamakAndroid module, Android apps would use TokamakAndroid with no need to be aware of any of the web modules.

Coding Style

This project uses SwiftFormat and SwiftLint to enforce formatting and coding style. SwiftFormat 0.45.3 and SwiftLint 0.39.2 or later versions are recommended. We encourage you to run SwiftFormat and SwiftLint within a local clone of the repository in whatever way works best for you. You can do that either manually, or automatically with VSCode extensions for SwiftFormat and SwiftLint respectively, or with the Xcode extension, or build phase.

To guarantee that these tools run before you commit your changes on macOS, you're encouraged to run this once to set up the pre-commit hook:

brew bundle # installs SwiftLint, SwiftFormat and pre-commit
pre-commit install # installs pre-commit hook to run checks before you commit

Refer to the pre-commit documentation page for more details and installation instructions for other platforms.

SwiftFormat and SwiftLint also run on CI for every PR and thus a CI build can fail with inconsistent formatting or style. We require CI builds to pass for all PRs before merging.