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Contributing to Squirrel

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Brendan Forster edited this page Oct 26, 2013 · 1 revision

Seeing how there's a lot of interest and activity in this project already, I thought I'd write up a quick guide to help YOU (yes, YOU!) get involved.

Citation: Uncle Sam

How can I help?

Like any decent OSS project, there's many ways you can help:

  • raising issues and reproducible samples that highlight things we need to fix
  • answering questions or issues that people have raised
  • writing documentation or blog posts about how to use it
  • submitting pull requests

It's not just about the code, so don't think getting involved is out of your reach.

"Jump In" to some bugfixes

If you're interested in getting down and dirty with the code, keep an eye on the "Jump In" label on incoming issues.

These are marked as issues which are:

  • isolated enough for someone to work on independent of the rest of the project
  • detailed enough that it should be clear what needs to be done
  • made up of small tasks, which shouldn't take more than a few nights

So bookmark this query and check back regularly.

If you see something you think you can take a shot at, leave a comment and jump in. Similarly, if you get stuck or won't be able to complete it soon, leave a comment and someone else might pick it up.

What you need to start coding

Just a few things:

  • A Windows PC (7 or 8 or 8.1, anything earlier is now officially a hipster OS)
  • Visual Studio 2012 (TODO: confirm Express SKUs do not hate on the NuGet things we do)

Get Squirrel working locally

If you're working on fixes and looking to test out things locally, this is how you can set up your environment for maximum happiness:

  • Clone the Squirrel repository to your local machine
  • Open a Git Shell (you have Git installed, right?)
  • Run .\script\bootstrap.ps1 to setup your environment
  • Open .\src\Squirrel.sln in Visual Studio and get coding

So you want to create test packages and install them locally, right? We've got you covered:

  • Run .\Create-Release.ps1 from your shell to generate packages
  • Run .\Create-Release.ps1 -config Debug from your shell to generate packages with debugger hooks (so you can step through the code when a program starts).

Both of these scripts will bump the version of your packages (modify the AssemblyInfo.cs files) so make sure you clean those up before committing.

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