hub/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to hub

You will need:

1. Go 1.3
2. Ruby 1.9+
3. git 1.8+
4. tmux & zsh (optional) - for running shell completion tests

What makes a good hub feature

hub is a tool that wraps git to provide useful integration with GitHub. A new feature is a good idea for hub if it improves some workflow for a GitHub user.

• A feature that encapsulates a git workflow not specific to GitHub is not a good fit for hub, since something like that is best implemented as an external script.
• If you're proposing to add a new custom command such as hub foo, please research if there's a possibility that such a custom command could conflict with other commands from popular 3rd party git projects.

How to install dependencies and run tests

These instructions assume that you already have hub installed and aliased as git (see "Aliasing").

1. Clone hub:
   git clone github/hub && cd hub
2. Install necessary development dependencies:
   script/bootstrap
3. Verify that existing tests pass:
   script/test
4. Create a topic branch:
   git checkout -b feature
5. Make your changes.
   (It helps a lot if you write tests first.)
6. Verify that tests still pass:
   script/test
7. Fork hub on GitHub (adds a remote named "YOUR-USER"):
   git fork
8. Push to your fork:
   git push <YOUR-USER> HEAD
9. Open a pull request describing your changes:
   git pull-request

How to write tests

The new test suite is written in Cucumber under features/ directory. Each scenario is actually making real invocations to hub on the command-line in the context of a real (dynamically created) git repository.

Whenever a scenario requires talking to the GitHub API, a fake HTTP server is spun locally to replace the real GitHub API. This is done so that the test suite runs faster and is available offline as well. The fake API server is defined as a Sinatra app inline in each scenario:

Given the GitHub API server:
  """
  post('/repos/github/hub/pulls') {
    status 200
  }
  """

The best way to learn to write new tests is to study the existing scenarios for commands that are similar to those that you want to add or change.