How to contribute

This document will eventually outline all aspects of guidance to make your contributing experience a fruitful and enjoyable one. What it already contains is information about commit message formatting and how that directly affects the numerous automated processes that are used for this repo. It also covers how to contribute to this formula’s documentation.

Overview

Submitting a pull request is more than just code! To achieve a quality product, the tests and documentation need to be updated as well. An excellent pull request will include these in the changes, wherever relevant.

1. Commit message formatting

Since every type of change requires making Git commits, we will start by covering the importance of ensuring that all of your commit messages are in the correct format.

1.1. Automation of multiple processes

This formula uses semantic-release for automating numerous processes such as bumping the version number appropriately, creating new tags/releases and updating the changelog. The entire process relies on the structure of commit messages to determine the version bump, which is then used for the rest of the automation.

Full details are available in the upstream docs regarding the Angular Commit Message Conventions. The key factor is that the first line of the commit message must follow this format:

Commit message format
type(scope): subject

  • E.g. docs(contributing): add commit message formatting instructions.

Besides the version bump, the changelog and release notes are formatted accordingly. So based on the example above:

Documentation

  • contributing: add commit message formatting instructions

  • The type translates into a Documentation sub-heading.

  • The (scope): will be shown in bold text without the brackets.

  • The subject follows the scope as standard text.

1.2. Linting commit messages in Travis CI

This formula uses commitlint for checking commit messages during CI testing. This ensures that they are in accordance with the semantic-release settings.

For more details about the default settings, refer back to the commitlint reference rules.

1.3. Relationship between commit type and version bump

This formula applies some customisations to the defaults, as outlined in the table below, based upon the type of the commit:

Table 1. Commit type vs. version bump
Type Heading Description Bump (default) Bump (custom)

build

Build System

Changes related to the build system

–

chore

–

Changes to the build process or auxiliary tools and libraries such as documentation generation

–

ci

Continuous Integration

Changes to the continuous integration configuration

–

docs

Documentation

Documentation only changes

–

0.0.1

feat

Features

A new feature

0.1.0

fix

Bug Fixes

A bug fix

0.0.1

perf

Performance Improvements

A code change that improves performance

0.0.1

refactor

Code Refactoring

A code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature

–

0.0.1

revert

Reverts

A commit used to revert a previous commit

–

0.0.1

style

Styles

Changes that do not affect the meaning of the code (white-space, formatting, missing semi-colons, etc.)

–

0.0.1

test

Tests

Adding missing or correcting existing tests

–

0.0.1

1.4. Use BREAKING CHANGE to trigger a major version change

Adding BREAKING CHANGE to the footer of the extended description of the commit message will always trigger a major version change, no matter which type has been used. This will be appended to the changelog and release notes as well. To preserve good formatting of these notes, the following format is prescribed:

  • BREAKING CHANGE: <explanation in paragraph format>.

An example of that:

Example of supplying BREAKING CHANGE in a commit message
...

BREAKING CHANGE: With the removal of all of the `.sls` files under
`template package`, this formula no longer supports the installation of
packages.

2. Documentation

This section refers to the Read the Docs documentation

This section is relevant to the Read the Docs documentation that currently exists while this Antora solution is being evaluated.

2.1. Toolchain

The documentation for this formula is written in reStructuredText (also known as RST, ReST, or reST). It is built by Sphinx and hosted on Read the Docs.

2.2. Adding a new page

Adding a new page involves two steps:

  1. Use the provided page template to create a new page.

  2. Add the page name under the toctree list in index.rst.

    1. Do not just append it to the list.

    2. Select the best place where it fits within the overall documentation.

2.3. SaltStack-Formulas' RST page template

Use the following template when creating a new page. This ensures consistency across the documentation for this formula. The heading symbols have been selected in accordance to the output rendered by the Markdown to reStructuredText converter we are using for some of the pages of this documentation.

RST page template
.. _template: (1)

[Page title] (2)
============

[Introductory paragraph] (3)

.. contents:: **Table of Contents** (4)

[Heading 2] (5)
-----------

[Heading 3] (5)
^^^^^^^^^^^

[Heading 4] (5)
~~~~~~~~~~~

[Heading 5] (6)
"""""""""""

[Heading 6] (6)
###########
1 The first line is an anchor that can be used to link back to (the top of) this file.

  • Change this to be the lowercase version of the file name.

  • Do not include the .rst file extension.

  • Use hyphens (-) instead of spaces or non-letter characters.
2 Change the [Page title] accordingly. Match the same number of equals signs (=) underneath.
3 Change the [Introductory paragraph] to be a short summary of the page content. Use no more than three paragraphs for this.
4 Leave the ..contents:: Table of Contents line as it is.
5 Use the remaining headings as required to break up the page content. Again, no single heading should have more than about three paragraphs of content before the next heading or sub-heading is used.
6 You will rarely need to use beyond [Heading 4].

Obviously, it is not necessary to follow the steps in the order above. For example, it is usually easier to write the [Introductory paragraph] at the end.