Contributing Guide

Code of Conduct

We welcome pull requests from everyone. By participating in this project, you agree to abide by the thoughtbot code of conduct.

We expect everyone to follow the code of conduct anywhere in thoughtbot's project codebases, issue trackers, chat-rooms, and mailing lists.

Getting Started

Administrate is a Rails Engine, but ships with everything needed to contribute and test new changes.

To maintain compatibility with multiple dependency versions, we use Appraisal.

Opening a PR

1. Fork the repo,
2. Run ./bin/setup to install the base dependencies and setup a local database,
3. Run the test suite: bundle exec rspec && bundle exec appraisal rspec,
4. Make your changes,
5. Push your fork and open a pull request.

A good PR will solve the smallest problem it possibly can, have good test coverage and (where necessary) have internationalisation support.

Running the application locally

Administrate's demo application can be run like any Rails application:

bin/dev

This will start the application defined in spec/example_app. You can view the example_app in the browser by navigating to /admin.

Repository Structure

• The gem's source code lives in the app and lib subdirectories.
• The demo app is nested within spec/example_app.
• The guides as seen at https://administrate-demo.herokuapp.com live as Markdown files in the docs subdirectory.

Rails configuration files have been changed to recognize the app in the new location, so running the server or deploying to Heroku works normally.

With this structure, developing a typical feature looks like:

• Add tests in spec/
• Implement a feature in administrate/
• Exercise the feature using the demo rails app (spec/example_app/app/)

Front-end Architecture

This project uses:

• Sass
• BEM-style CSS selectors, with namespaces
• Autoprefixer
• SCSS-Lint, with Hound
• A variety of CSS units:
  • em for typographical-related elements
  • rem for lengths related to components
  • px for borders, text shadows, etc.
  • vw/vh for lengths that should be relational to the viewport

Labels

Issues and PRs are split into two levels of labels, at the higher level:

• feature: new functionality that’s not yet implemented,
• bug: breakages in functionality that is implemented,
• maintenance: to keep up with changes around us

…and then to more specific themes:

• namespacing: models with a namespace,
• installing: initial setup, first-run experience, generators,
• i18n: translations and language support,
• views-and-styles: how administrate looks and is interacted with,
• dashboards: how administrate presents fields and displays data,
• search: finding things through our models,
• sorting: ordering things on dashboards,
• pagination: how we handle lots of data in small chunks,
• security: controlling data access through authorisation,
• fields: new fields, displaying and editing data,
• models: models, associations and fetching the underlying data,
• documentation: how to use Administrate, examples and common usage,
• dependencies: changes or issues relating to a dependency

Security

See the security policy.

Releasing

New releases (and the time period between them) is arbitrary, but usually motivated by a new Rails release or enough bug fixes or features that there's significant enough changes.

A new release involves cutting and pushing a new version to Ruby Gems and then deploying that version of the example application and documentation. This means that the demo application always matches the current release, whilst the pre-release application will track current master.