Contributing

There are a number of Grunt projects.

In addition, each individual grunt-contrib plugin is a separate repository listed on the gruntjs org homepage. Each repository has its own maintainers, you can easily find the maintainers by looking at recent commits and pushes. Just create an issue in the repository that interests you and @mention one of the maintainers to get started.

Contributors License Agreement

Most forms of contribution aside from providing support to other users requires that you sign and submit a Contributors License Agreement (or "CLA" for short) with the jQuery Foundation.

In summary, the CLA asserts that when you donate fixes or documentation, you both own the code that you're submitting and that the jQuery Foundation can in turn license that code to other people.

Sending in a CLA is a one-time thing, and once it's done, you're in the clear to start contributing to all jQuery Foundation projects! To be effective, though, you need to know a little bit about how contributors and Committers coordinate their work, so getting involved and asking questions should be your first step.

For more on CLAs, read Alex Russell's Why Do I Need to Sign This?.

Want to contribute?

If you want to contribute, but don't know where to get started, this is for you. Issues that are linked below were marked as needs PR, this means they need a pull request to be fixed. Choose any of these issues and make sure to comment if you are working on them.

Publishing a new version

To publish a new version of a grunt-contrib-* plugin follow these steps:

  • check the plugin GitHub page to make sure it is passing Travis CI.
  • cd into the plugin directory.
  • git pull the latest changes from the master branch.
  • rm -rf node_modules remove stale or old node modules.
  • npm install to get the latest version of the node modules.
  • run npm test and make sure all tests pass locally.
  • bump the version in package.json
  • update CHANGELOG.md
  • run grunt in the plugin directory. This should generate the new README.
  • commit the changelog, package.json and README changes.
  • create a new git tag for the new version. use this format for the tag: vX.Y.Z. (such as v0.1.13)
  • push changes to master, push tag to the plugin repo.
  • Publish to npm: npm publish .. If you do not have access to npm publish ask one of the core contributors to publish for you.

Non-code contributions

If you don't feel like writing code you can still contribute to the project!

Filing issues

If something isn't working like you think it should, please read the documentation, especially the Getting Started guide. If you'd like to chat with someone, pop into IRC discussing-grunt and ask your question there.

If you have a question not covered in the documentation or want to report a bug, the best way to ensure it gets addressed is to file it in the appropriate issues tracker.

  • If there's an issue with grunt, grunt-init, a grunt-lib-??? module, or a specific grunt-contrib-??? plugin
    • Please file an issue on that project's issues tracker.
  • If you'd like to contribute a new plugin
  • If there's an issue with the website
  • If there's an issue that isn't specific to any of the above

Simplify the issue

Try to reduce your code to the bare minimum required to reproduce the issue. This makes it much easier (and much faster) to isolate and fix the issue.

Explain the issue

If we can't reproduce the issue, we can't fix it. Please list the exact steps required to reproduce the issue. Include versions of your OS, Node.js, grunt, etc. Include relevant logs or sample code.

Discussing grunt

Join the freenode: IRC #grunt channel for general discussion or #grunt-dev for core and plugin development discussion. We've got a bot and everything.

No private messages, please.

Modifying grunt

First, ensure that you have the latest Node.js and npm installed.

  1. Ensure grunt-cli is installed (see the Getting started guide for more information)
  2. Fork and clone the repo.
  3. Check out the master branch (most grunt/grunt-contrib development happens there).
  4. Run npm install to install all Grunt dependencies.
  5. Run npm uninstall grunt this will remove the extra Grunt in your node_modules, see npm issue 3958
  6. Run grunt to Grunt grunt.

Assuming that you don't see any red, you're ready to go. Just be sure to run grunt after making any changes, to ensure that nothing has broken.

Submitting pull requests

  1. Create a new branch, please don't work in master directly.
  2. Add failing tests for the change you want to make. Run grunt to see the tests fail.
  3. Fix stuff.
  4. Run grunt to see if the tests pass. Repeat steps 2-4 until done.
  5. Update the documentation to reflect any changes.
  6. Push to your fork and submit a pull request.

Syntax

  • Two space indents. Don't use tabs anywhere. Use \t if you need a tab character in a string.
  • No trailing whitespace, except in markdown files where a linebreak must be forced.
  • Don't go overboard with the whitespace.
  • No more than one assignment per var statement.
  • Delimit strings with single-quotes ', not double-quotes ".
  • Prefer if and else to "clever" uses of ? : conditional or ||, && logical operators.
  • Comments are great. Just put them before the line of code, not at the end of the line.
  • When in doubt, follow the conventions you see used in the source already.

READMEs

All of the grunt-contrib-* plugins use grunt-contrib-internal to construct the README.md and CONTRIBUTING.md files. The source files are located in the corresponding docs/ folder. The change logs in the READMEs are generated from the CHANGELOG file.

When submitting changes to the README files please just edit the source files rather than the README directly.

Found an error in the documentation? File an issue.