First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute! ❤️
All types of contributions are encouraged and valued. See the Table of Contents for different ways to help and details about how this project handles them. Please make sure to read the relevant section before making your contribution. It will make it a lot easier for us maintainers and smooth out the experience for all involved. The community looks forward to your contributions. 🎉
And if you like the project, but just don't have time to contribute, that's fine. There are other easy ways to support the project and show your appreciation, which we would also be very happy about:
- Star the project
- Tweet about it
- Refer this project in your project's readme
- Mention the project at local meetups and tell your friends/colleagues
- Code of Conduct
- I Have a Question
- I Want To Contribute
- Reporting Bugs
- Suggesting Enhancements
- Your First Code Contribution
- Improving The Documentation
- Styleguides
- Commit Messages
- Join The Project Team
This project and everyone participating in it is governed by the Dust Code of Conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code.
If you want to ask a question, we assume that you have read the available Documentation.
Before you ask a question, it is best to search for existing Issues that might help you. In case you have found a suitable issue and still need clarification, you can write your question in this issue. It is also advisable to search the internet for answers first.
If you then still feel the need to ask a question and need clarification, we recommend the following:
- Open an Issue.
- Provide as much context as you can about what you're running into.
- Provide project and platform versions (nodejs, npm, etc), depending on what seems relevant.
We will then take care of the issue as soon as possible.
When contributing to this project, you must agree that you have authored 100% of the content, that you have the necessary rights to the content and that the content you contribute may be provided under the project license.
A good bug report shouldn't leave others needing to chase you up for more information. Therefore, we ask you to investigate carefully, collect information and describe the issue in detail in your report. Please complete the following steps in advance to help us fix any potential bug as fast as possible.
- Make sure that you are using the latest version.
- Determine if your bug is really a bug and not an error on your side e.g. using incompatible environment components/versions (Make sure that you have read the documentation. If you are looking for support, you might want to check this section).
- To see if other users have experienced (and potentially already solved) the same issue you are having, check if there is not already a bug report existing for your bug or error in the bug tracker.
- Also make sure to search the internet (including Stack Overflow) to see if users outside of the GitHub community have discussed the issue.
- Collect information about the bug:
- Stack trace (Traceback)
- OS, Platform and Version (Windows, Linux, macOS, x86, ARM)
- Version of the interpreter, compiler, SDK, runtime environment, package manager, depending on what seems relevant.
- Possibly your input and the output
- Can you reliably reproduce the issue? And can you also reproduce it with older versions?
We use GitHub issues to track bugs and errors. If you run into an issue with the project:
- Open an Issue and select the Bug Report template.
- Fill out all required fields in the template.
- Explain the behavior you would expect and the actual behavior.
- Please provide as much context as possible and describe the reproduction steps that someone else can follow to recreate the issue on their own. This usually includes your code. For good bug reports you should isolate the problem and create a reduced test case.
- Provide the information you collected in the previous section.
Note: The bug report template includes guidance on conventional commit format for when you submit a fix!
Once it's filed:
- The project team will label the issue accordingly.
- A team member will try to reproduce the issue with your provided steps. If there are no reproduction steps or no obvious way to reproduce the issue, the team will ask you for those steps and mark the issue as
needs-repro. Bugs with theneeds-reprotag will not be addressed until they are reproduced. - If the team is able to reproduce the issue, it will be marked
needs-fix, as well as possibly other tags (such ascritical), and the issue will be left to be implemented by someone.
This section guides you through submitting an enhancement suggestion for Dust, including completely new features and minor improvements to existing functionality. Following these guidelines will help maintainers and the community to understand your suggestion and find related suggestions.
- Make sure that you are using the latest version.
- Read the documentation carefully and find out if the functionality is already covered, maybe by an individual configuration.
- Perform a search to see if the enhancement has already been suggested. If it has, add a comment to the existing issue instead of opening a new one.
- Find out whether your idea fits with the scope and aims of the project. It's up to you to make a strong case to convince the project's developers of the merits of this feature. Keep in mind that we want features that will be useful to the majority of our users and not just a small subset. If you're just targeting a minority of users, consider writing an add-on/plugin library.
Enhancement suggestions are tracked as GitHub issues.
- Open an Issue and select the Feature Request template.
- Fill out all required fields in the template.
- Use a clear and descriptive title for the issue to identify the suggestion.
- Provide a step-by-step description of the suggested enhancement in as many details as possible.
- Describe the current behavior and explain which behavior you expected to see instead and why. At this point you can also tell which alternatives do not work for you.
- You may want to include screenshots and animated GIFs which help you demonstrate the steps or point out the part which the suggestion is related to. You can use this tool to record GIFs on macOS and Windows, and this tool or this tool on Linux.
- Explain why this enhancement would be useful to most Dust users. You may also want to point out the other projects that solved it better and which could serve as inspiration.
Note: The feature request template includes guidance on conventional commit format for when you implement the feature!
Ready to contribute code? Great! Here's how to get started:
- Fork the repository and clone it locally
- Set up your development environment (see README.md)
- Create a branch for your changes:
git checkout -b fix/your-bug-fixorfeat/your-feature - Make your changes following our code style
- Test your changes thoroughly
- Commit using conventional commit format (see below)
- Push to your fork and create a Pull Request
When you create a PR, our Pull Request template will guide you through the process and remind you about commit message conventions.
Documentation improvements are always welcome!
- Open an Issue using the Documentation Update template
- Or submit a PR with your documentation changes directly
- Use the
docs:commit type for documentation changes
This project uses Conventional Commits for automated versioning and changelog generation.
<type>(<scope>): <subject>
<body>
<footer>
feat:- New feature → triggers minor version bump (0.1.0 → 0.2.0)fix:- Bug fix → triggers patch version bump (0.1.0 → 0.1.1)perf:- Performance improvement → triggers patch version bumpdocs:- Documentation changes → no releasestyle:- Code style changes → no releaserefactor:- Code refactoring → no release (but shown in changelog)test:- Test changes → no releasebuild:- Build system changes → no releaseci:- CI/CD changes → no releasechore:- Other changes → no release
Bug Fix:
git commit -m "fix: resolve database connection timeout
Fixed an issue where the database would timeout after
30 seconds of inactivity by increasing the timeout to 5 minutes.
Fixes #123"New Feature:
git commit -m "feat: add book search by ISBN
Implements ISBN-based search functionality allowing users
to quickly find books by their ISBN number.
Closes #456"Breaking Change (triggers major version bump):
git commit -m "feat: redesign authentication system
Replaced JWT-based auth with OAuth2.
BREAKING CHANGE: Old JWT tokens are no longer valid.
All users must re-authenticate after this update.
Closes #789"Documentation:
git commit -m "docs: update installation guide
Added Windows-specific instructions and troubleshooting tips."You can add a scope to provide more context:
feat(api): add new endpoint for book ratingsfix(auth): correct token expiration logicdocs(readme): update environment variables section
Using conventional commits:
- ✅ Automatically generates version numbers
- ✅ Creates detailed changelogs
- ✅ Triggers appropriate releases (major/minor/patch)
- ✅ Makes it easy to understand changes at a glance
Our CI/CD pipeline (using semantic-release) reads these commit messages to automate the entire release process!
For more details, see RELEASE-PROCESS.md.
TODO:
This guide is based on the contributing-gen. Make your own!