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Developing Neutrino

Developing and contributing to Neutrino, its core presets, and middleware is done through our monorepo located at https://github.com/mozilla-neutrino/neutrino-dev. The code is broken up into a couple different sections: packages and documentation.

Note: In this guide, commands executable from the command line are prepended with ❯. Lines not starting with this symbol show sample console output from running the previous command.

Requirements

Developing for neutrino-dev requires:

  • Node.js v8.3+
  • Yarn v1.2.1+, installation instructions at https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/install
  • git, GitHub account

Getting started

The first step to start developing neutrino-dev is forking the repository to your own GitHub account.

Fork mozilla-neutrino/neutrino-dev on GitHub

Once that is done, you can clone your copy of the repository on your computer, replacing USER with the username of the account you forked the repository to:

❯ git clone git@github.com:USER/neutrino-dev.git
❯ cd neutrino-dev

Upon cloning, you should install dependencies:

❯ yarn

This uses the yarn workspaces feature to create symlinks between the various packages, simplifying local development.

Development commands

The package.json for neutrino-dev defines several commands to assist in the development and deployment process.

link:all

Runs yarn link against all packages in the neutrino-dev monorepo. This allows you to run yarn link <package> anywhere on your system for neutrino-dev packages, making testing of the packages simpler in local projects.

❯ yarn link:all

# Elsewhere on your system
❯ yarn link @neutrinojs/react

test

Runs the unit test suite against all packages in the monorepo. For the most part the intent of the unit tests is to ensure that packages do not throw errors when being required or used as middleware by Neutrino. These tests typically do not ensure that their middleware produces the expected output, instead leaving this functionality for integration tests via test:create-project.

test:create-project

Runs the integration test suite by determining correct output of the create-project CLI tool and ensuring that package.json scripts do not throw. This test requires a local verdaccio instance to be running, and this is ensured in CI via the scripts/test-create-project-ci.sh script. Typically this command is only used in CI, with the unit tests being run locally via yarn test. If you do run this command locally by setting up verdaccio locally as well, ensure that you revert back any changes you make to your local registry when finished with:

yarn config set registry https://registry.yarnpkg.com

changelog

Generates a changelog for the mozilla-neutrino/neutrino-dev GitHub repository. This changelog is output to a CHANGELOG.md file in the root of the repository.

❯ yarn changelog

docs:bootstrap

Installs the Python dependencies required to build the documentation. You may wish to active a virtualenv first.

❯ yarn docs:bootstrap

docs:serve

Starts a local development server which builds the documentation in docs and serves it on port 8000.

❯ yarn docs:serve

Making changes

When you make changes to neutrino-dev, you should make them in a branch separate from master. Start from the master branch and create a new branch for your changes.

Example: You want to create a core preset for JavaScript Standard Style. You need a new branch for this work.

❯ git checkout -b standard-style
Switched to a new branch 'standard-style'

While making changes, be sure to test your code out for expected operation. If possible or applicable, write a test that can verify these changes in the future.

Submitting a pull request

Once you are satisfied with your changes, you should commit them and submit a pull request. Use git add in order to add files that should be committed. Give your changes a descriptive but not overly verbose message.

❯ git add .
❯ git commit -m "Feature: Adding new core preset for JavaScript Standard Style"
❯ git push origin standard-style

Now if you open the GitHub page for your repository, GitHub should display a button to open a pull request for the branch and commit you just pushed. When filling out the details of the pull request, try to be as descriptive as possible, following our detailed contribution guidelines.

Congrats!

You just made a contribution to Neutrino! We are so happy to have your help! 🎉

Receiving updates

If you need to update your local copy of neutrino-dev to be in sync with the main neutrino-dev repository, you will want to fetch upstream changes. Add the main neutrino-dev repo as an upstream to your local copy, then fetch the latest changes from the master branch.

❯ git checkout master
❯ git remote add upstream https://github.com/mozilla-neutrino/neutrino-dev.git
❯ git pull upstream master