PSRule/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to PSRule

Welcome, and thank you for your interest in contributing to PSRule!

There are many ways in which you can contribute, beyond writing code. The goal of this document is to provide a high-level overview of how you can get involved.

• Reporting issues
• Improve documentation
• Fix bugs or add features

Asking Questions

Have a question? Rather than opening an issue, please ask a question in discussions. Your well-worded question will serve as a resource to others searching for help.

Reporting issues

Have you identified a reproducible problem? Have a feature request? We want to hear about it! Here's how you can make reporting your issue as effective as possible.

Identify Where to Report

The PSRule project is distributed across multiple repositories. Try to file the issue against the correct repository. Check the list of related projects if you aren't sure which repository is correct.

Look for an existing issue

Before you create a new issue, please do a search in open issues to see if the issue or feature request has already been filed.

If you find your issue already exists, make relevant comments and add your reaction. Use a reaction in place of a "+1" comment:

• 👍 - upvote

• 👎 - downvote

Improving documentation

This project contains a wide range of documentation, stored in docs/. Some of the documentation that you might like to improve include:

• Scenarios and examples (docs/authoring/ and docs/scenarios/).
• PowerShell cmdlet and conceptual topics (docs/commands/ and docs/concepts/).

Markdown formatting

When writing documentation in Markdown, please follow these formatting guidelines:

• Semantically break up long paragraphs into multiple lines, particularly if they contain multiple sentences.
• Add a blank line between paragraphs.
• Add a blank line before and after lists, code blocks, and section headers.

Contributing to code

• Before writing a fix or feature enhancement, ensure that an issue is logged.
• Be prepared to discuss a feature and take feedback.
• Include unit tests and updates documentation to complement the change.

When you are ready to contribute a fix or feature:

• Start by forking the PSRule repo.
• Create a new branch from main in your fork.
• Add commits in your branch.
  • If you have updated module code also update CHANGELOG.md.
  • You don't need to update the CHANGELOG.md for changes to unit tests or documentation.
  • Try building your changes locally. See building from source for instructions.
• Create a pull request to merge changes into the PSRule main branch.
  • If you are ready for your changes to be reviewed create a pull request.
  • If you are not ready for your changes to be reviewed, create a draft pull request.
  • An continuous integration (CI) process will automatically build your changes.
    • You changes must build successfully to be merged.
    • If you have any build errors, push new commits to your branch.
    • Avoid using forced pushes or squashing changes while in review, as this makes reviewing your changes harder.

Intro to Git and GitHub

When contributing to documentation or code changes, you'll need to have a GitHub account and a basic understanding of Git. Check out the links below to get started.

• Make sure you have a GitHub account.
• GitHub Help:
  • Git and GitHub learning resources.
  • GitHub Flow Guide.
  • Fork a repo.
  • About Pull Requests.

Code editor

You should use the multi-platform [Visual Studio Code][vscode] (VS Code). The project contains a number of workspace specific settings that make it easier to author consistently.

After installing VS Code, install the following extensions:

• YAML
• PowerShell
• Code Spell Checker

Building and testing

When creating a pull request to merge your changes, a continuous integration (CI) pipeline is run. The CI pipeline will build then test your changes across MacOS, Linux and Windows configurations.

Before opening a pull request try building your changes locally. To do this See building from source for instructions.

Contributor License Agreement (CLA)

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.microsoft.com.

When you submit a pull request, a CLA-bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., label, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repositories using our CLA.

Code of Conduct

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.

Thank You!

Your contributions to open source, large or small, make great projects like this possible. Thank you for taking the time to contribute.