Contributing Code to react-server

Want to help?

Great! There's a lot to do!

You could:

Improve documentation
Fix bugs
Build new features
Help triage issues

Not sure where to start? Join us on slack and ask!

Getting started

React Server uses a tool called Lerna to manage the entire React Server ecosystem in a single repository. This allows maintainers to know that everything works together well, without having to know all of the inner workings of each package in the monorepo. It does present some challenges to new developers, since the idea is relatively new. If you want to know more about why we chose a monorepo, check out the babel monorepo design doc, especially the previous discussion.

To get your local clone into working order, run an

npm run bootstrap

If things get hairy and you have errors that you don't understand, you can get a clean install of all the dependencies

npm run nuke
npm run bootstrap

If you've been running bootstrap to track down build errors a lot, and have a lot of debug files lying around, you can clean them up

npm run clean

Most commands have a corresponding lerna command; if you want to find out more, you can look at the scripts hash in the root package.json, check out the lerna docs, and run the lerna commands yourself

npm i -g lerna david
lerna clean
lerna bootstrap
lerna run lint
lerna exec -- david u

You can no longer work on a single package by cd-ing into that module, and using normal npm scripts. This is because of the way lerna hoists commands up to the root level. When working on a single package, instead run the lerna command with a scope of that package name.

For example, from the root of the repo:

lerna run build --scope 'react-server'
lerna run build --scope 'react-server-cli'
lerna run test --scope 'react-server-cli'

You should always run a full monorepo lint, build, and test before submitting a pr.

npm run lint
npm run clean
npm run build
npm run test

Testing

Yeah! Do it!

Head over to react-server-test-pages and check out the README to get a test server set up.

Add some automated integration tests if you're up for it.

If nothing else, check for regressions:

npm test

That will, among other things, run eslint.

If you would like to test your changes in React Server core in a project from outside of the monorepo, you'll need to use npm install with a local file path to do it.

cd /path/to/my/project
npm install /path/to/react-server/packages/react-server

Make sure you install the path to React Server core, instead of the monorepo root, or else you'll get the following error

npm ERR! addLocal Could not install /Users/vince.chang/code/react-server
npm ERR! Darwin 15.2.0
npm ERR! argv "/path/to/node/v4.3.1/bin/node" "/path/to/node/v4.3.1/bin/npm" "i" "/path/to/react-server"
npm ERR! node v4.3.1
npm ERR! npm  v2.14.12

npm ERR! No name provided in package.json
npm ERR!
npm ERR! If you need help, you may report this error at:
npm ERR!     <https://github.com/npm/npm/issues>

npm ERR! Please include the following file with any support request:
npm ERR!     /path/to/my/project/npm-debug.log

You can't use npm link, since when you npm link /path/to/react-server, React Server and your instance will use separate versions of react, request-local-storage, q, superagent &c, which introduces bugs in React Server. Even if you were to remove all those singleton modules from your client, or from React Server code, then you’d still have problems, because react-server doesn’t have access to your instance's dependencies, and vice versa.

Note that if you would like to test changes in a fork of React Server, you can't install from your github fork because it will attempt to install the monorepo instead of React Server core, and the monorepo is not a valid node module. Instead, we recommend you publish a test version into a npm private repository, like npm Enterprise or Sinopia.

If you add a new test that starts a server, make sure to update the testing port registry to make sure there aren't any conflicts. Our CI test target runs many packages' tests simultaneously, so its important that every server starts on a unique port. You can find the manifest in the docs.

If you're making changes to the website, you'll want it to use the docs that are checked out on disk, rather than on github (we get the markdown directly from github so we don't have to reploy the site every time we update the docs). You can do this by setting the LOCAL_DOCS environment variable.

LOCAL_DOCS=1 npm start

Contributor License Agreement

To get started, please sign the Contributor License Agreement. The purpose of this license is to protect contributors, Redfin, as well as users of this software project. Signing this agreement does not affect your rights to use your contributions for any other purpose.

Code of Conduct

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.

Thanks!

Thanks for contributing!

Provide feedback

Saved searches

Use saved searches to filter your results more quickly

Uh oh!