CONTRIBUTING.rst

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.

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Commit message formatting
  • Automation of multiple processes
  • Linting commit messages in Travis CI
  • Relationship between commit type and version bump
  • Use BREAKING CHANGE to trigger a major version change

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.

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.

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:

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:

• 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.

Linting commit messages in Travis CI