Contributing to Licensee

Hi there! We're thrilled that you'd like to contribute to Licensee. Your help is essential for keeping it great.

Licensee is an open source project supported by the efforts of an entire community and built one contribution at a time by users like you. We'd love for you to get involved. Whatever your level of skill or however much time you can give, your contribution is greatly appreciated. There are many ways to contribute, from writing tutorials or blog posts, improving the documentation, submitting bug reports and feature requests, helping other users by commenting on issues, or writing code which can be incorporated into Licensee itself.

Following these guidelines helps to communicate that you respect the time of the developers managing and developing this open source project. In return, they should reciprocate that respect in addressing your issue, assessing changes, and helping you finalize your pull requests.

Looking for support?

We'd love to help. Check out the support guidelines.

How to report a bug

Think you found a bug? Please check the list of open issues to see if your bug has already been reported. If it hasn't please submit a new issue.

Here are a few tips for writing great bug reports:

Describe the specific problem (e.g., "widget doesn't turn clockwise" versus "getting an error")
Include the steps to reproduce the bug, what you expected to happen, and what happened instead
Check that you are using the latest version of the project and its dependencies
Include what version of the project your using, as well as any relevant dependencies
Only include one bug per issue. If you have discovered two bugs, please file two issues
Include screenshots or screencasts whenever possible
Even if you don't know how to fix the bug, including a failing test may help others track it down

If you find a security vulnerability, do not open an issue. Please email ben@balter.com instead.

How to suggest a feature or enhancement

If you find yourself wishing for a feature that doesn't exist in Licensee, you are probably not alone. There are bound to be others out there with similar needs. Many of the features that Licensee has today have been added because our users saw the need.

Feature requests are welcome. But take a moment to find out whether your idea fits with the scope and goals 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. Please provide as much detail and context as possible, including describing the problem you're trying to solve.

Open an issue which describes the feature you would like to see, why you want it, how it should work, etc.

Reporting an improperly detected license

Licensee is an open source project used by hosted services like GitHub and GitLab which often detect licenses using prior versions of Licensee and cache the result.

If you'd like to report that a license is improperly detected by a hosted service, please contact GitHub support or GitLab support directly.

To check if Licensee itself can properly detect a license, please:

Clone the repository locally git clone https://github.com/benbalter/licensee
script/bootstrap
script/git-repo [URL to your repository]

If Licensee cannot detect the license locally, open an issue and include the output of script/git-repo.

Adding a license

Licensee doesn't curate any license information directly. Instead, we rely on the licenses and metadata provided by choosealicense.com and its much larger community (which can properly vet licenses and make determinations as to their properties).

Interested in adding support for Licensee to detect an additional license? Please follow these instructions to submit a pull request to get the license added upstream, and it will be automatically vendored (and detected) here.

Updating the licenses

License data is pulled from choosealicense.com. To update the license data, simple run script/vendor-licenses.

Your first contribution

We'd love for you to contribute to the project. Unsure where to begin contributing to Licensee? You can start by looking through these "good first issue" and "help wanted" issues:

Good first issues - issues which should only require a few lines of code and a test or two
Help wanted issues - issues which may be a bit more involved, but are specifically seeking community contributions

p.s. Feel free to ask for help; everyone is a beginner at first 😺

How to propose changes

Here's a few general guidelines for proposing changes:

If you are changing any user-facing functionality, please be sure to update the documentation
If you are adding a new behavior or changing an existing behavior, please be sure to update the corresponding test(s)
Each pull request should implement one feature or bug fix. If you want to add or fix more than one thing, submit more than one pull request
Do not commit changes to files that are irrelevant to your feature or bug fix
Don't bump the version number in your pull request (it will be bumped prior to release)
Write a good commit message

At a high level, the process for proposing changes is:

Fork and clone the project
Configure and install the dependencies: script/bootstrap
Make sure the tests pass on your machine: script/cibuild
Create a descriptively named branch: git checkout -b my-branch-name
Make your change, add tests and documentation, and make sure the tests still pass
Push to your fork and submit a pull request describing your change
Pat your self on the back and wait for your pull request to be reviewed and merged

Interesting in submitting your first Pull Request? It's easy! You can learn how from this free series How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub

Bootstrapping your local development environment

script/bootstrap

Running tests

script/cibuild

Code of conduct

This project is governed by the Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code.

Additional Resources

Contributing to Open Source on GitHub
Using Pull Requests
GitHub Help

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