h.i. project contribution guide

Want to contribute to an h.i. project? This is how you do it.

Forking a project

The first step to contributing to an h.i. project is making a copy of it by forking it, which will create a new working instance of the current code without affecting the main codebase. This is accomplished by going to the project's main page and hitting the 'fork' button in the upper right corner of the page. Name your fork whatever you like and now you have a copy of the project that you can tinker with. Good job!

Cloning your fork and making a branch for edits

Now that your fork is ready, let's grab a copy of it so you can start making some cool changes. Open up your terminal and clone a copy of your fork to your machine. The URL of your fork can be found on your fork page.

git clone https://koodu.h-i.works/YOURNAME/YOURFORKNAME.git.

Assuming everything went well, you should now have a copy of your fork on your machine. Now you're ready to make changes.

To avoid conflicts with other people who will be contributing to your project as well, create a specific branch for the changes you want to make. The name of this branch should relate to the nature of the change you are making, for example, if you are updating the README, a good name for that branch could be tweaking-the-readme. It doesn't have to be fancy but what is being changed should be apparent at a glance. Once you've decided on the name create the branch and then check it out to work on it.

git branch YOUR-BRANCH-NAME
git checkout YOUR-BRANCH-NAME

Making changes and adding them to the main branch

Now that you are in your branch for the changes you want to make, pop open your favorite text editor and hack away. As your changes are in your fork with its branch, you don't have to worry about interfering with another contributor's work.

Once you've made the changes you want to see, the next step is to have your changes evaluated to see if it is ready to add to the main project. To do this, create a Pull Request to signal you are ready for your changes to be reviewed. This can be accomplished by going to your fork repository page and hitting the 'Pull Request' tab. The main codebase is the projects: develop option and it will be pulling from the branch you created for the changes you made.

If your changes need some work, they will be listed in the pull request and you can make those edits at your convenience. Once the pull request is ready and validated, it will then be merged into the main codebase.

YOU'RE NOW AN h.i. CONTRIBUTOR! YOU DID GREAT!