mediawiki-extensions-VisualEditor/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to VisualEditor

Thank you for helping us develop VisualEditor!

This document describes how to report bugs, set up your development environment, run tests, and build documentation. It also provides the coding conventions we use in the project.

Bug reports

Please report bugs to bugzilla.wikimedia.org using the VisualEditor product. Feel free to use the General component if you don't know where else your bug might belong. Don't worry about specifying version, severity, hardware, or OS.

Running tests

VisualEditor's build scripts use the Grunt task runner. To install it make sure you have node and npm installed, then run:

# Install Grunt command-line utility
$ npm install -g grunt-cli

# Install VisualEditor's dev dependencies
$ npm install

To run the tests, use:

$ grunt test

For other grunt tasks, see:

$ grunt --help

To run the tests in a web browser, make sure your MediaWiki install is configured to allow running of tests. Set in LocalSettings.php:

// https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:JavaScript_unit_testing
$wgEnableJavaScriptTest = true;

Then open http://URL_OF_MEDIAWIKI/index.php/Special:JavaScriptTest/qunit (for example, http://localhost/w/index.php/Special:JavaScriptTest/qunit).

Building documentation

VisualEditor uses JSDuck to process documentation comments embedded in the code. To build the documentation, you will need ruby, gem, and jsduck installed.

Installing ruby and gem

You're mostly on your own here, but we can give some hints for Mac OS X.

Installing Gem in Mac OS X

Ruby ships with OSX but may be outdated. Use Homebrew:

$ brew install ruby

If you've never used gem before, don't forget to add the gem's bin to your PATH (howto).

Installing jsduck

Once you have gem, installing JSDuck is easy:

$ gem install --user-install jsduck --version '< 5'

You need to make sure that you are using jsduck 4.x, as jsduck 5.x introduced incompatible changes to custom tags.

Running jsduck

Creating the documentation is easy:

$ cd VisualEditor
$ .docs/generate.sh

You may need to set MW_INSTALL_PATH in your environment to the location of your mediawiki installation if VisualEditor is not checked out directly in the mediawiki extensions folder (for example, if you're using a symlink).

The generated documentation is in the docs/ subdirectory. View the documentation at http://URL_OF_MEDIAWIKI/extensions/VisualEditor/docs/ (for example, http://localhost/w/extensions/VisualEditor/docs).

Note that jsduck doesn't support browsing vis the file: protocol.

VisualEditor Code Guidelines

We inherit the code structure (about whitespace, naming and comments) conventions from MediaWiki. See Manual:Coding conventions/JavaScript on mediawiki.org.

Documentation comments

• End sentences in a full stop.
• Continue sentences belonging to an annotation on the next line, indented with an additional space.
• Types in documentation comments should be separated by a pipe character. Use types that are listed in the Types section of this document, otherwise use the identifier (full path from the global scope) of the constructor function (e.g. {ve.dm.BranchNode}).

Annotations

We use the following annotations. They should be used in the order as they are described here, for consistency. See JSDuck/Tags for more elaborate documentation.

• @class Name (optional, guessed)
• @abstract
• @extends ClassName
• @mixins ClassName
• @constructor
• @private
• @static
• @method name (optional, guessed)
• @template
• @property name (optional, guessed)
• @until Text: Optional text.
• @source Text
• @context {Type} Optional text.
• @param {Type} name Optional text.
• @emits name
• @returns {Type} Optional text.
• @chainable
• @throws {Type}

Types

Special values:

• undefined
• null
• this

Primitive types:

• boolean
• number
• string

Built-in classes:

• Array
• Date
• Function
• RegExp
• Object

Browser classes:

• HTMLElement

jQuery classes:

• jQuery
• jQuery.Event

Add a new javascript class

When a new javascript class is added, the file must be referenced in a number of places before it can be used.

Test files:

• VisualEditor.hooks.php in onResourceLoaderTestModules

Regular files:

• .docs/categories.json in General->Utilities (or somewhere more specific)
• VisualEditor.php in ext.visualEditor.core (or somewhere more specific)
• Run php maintenance/makeStaticLoader.php --target demo --write-file demos/ve/index.php
• Run php maintenance/makeStaticLoader.php --target test --write-file modules/ve/test/index.php

makeStaticLoader.php is a maintenance script to automatically generate an HTML document fragment containing script tags in dependency order (for standalone environments without ResourceLoader).