Welcome to the Ghost Buses project.

Welcome to Ghost Buses! We're using public data to track the reliability of CTA buses in Chicago and uncover any discrepancies between scheduled and actual service levels. This repository contains the frontend for our project, built with React and react-leaflet. We welcome all contributions to help us improve and grow Ghost Buses.

We are a breakout group that's part of Chi Hack Night, a weekly civic tech event in Chicago. Chi Hack Night is a community of designers, developers, and organizers who come together to work on projects that have an impact on the city of Chicago. If you'd like to learn more about Chi Hack Night, you can visit their website at http://chihacknight.org.

You can see our project at https://ghostbuses.com/.

Thank you for stopping by!

How to contribute

Here's how you can contribute:

1. First, fork the repository and clone it to your local machine. The frontend repository is located at https://github.com/chihacknight/ghost-buses-frontend and the backend repository is located at https://github.com/chihacknight/chn-ghost-buses.

2. We use Git Flow for our development workflow. If you're not familiar with Git Flow, you can read about it here: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/quickstart/github-flow.

3. When you're ready to work on an issue, please leave a comment on the issue to let the team know that you'd like to take it on. You can also assign the issue to yourself in GitHub.

4. Make your changes on a new branch and commit them to your fork. We recommend following conventional commits (https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/) when making contributions. When you're ready to submit your changes for review, open a pull request (PR) targeting the dev branch. Netlify will spin up an ephemeral environment upon making your PR, which you can use to test your changes.

5. We require at least one review from a project maintainer before merging your changes into the dev branch. After your PR has been approved, you can merge it into dev.

6. The team will then merge dev into the main branch when we're ready to deploy to our Netlify instance.

Thank you for your interest in contributing to the Ghost Buses project! If you have any questions or need assistance, don't hesitate to ask.

Suggested areas for contribution

If you have an idea for improving the project but aren't sure where to start, we welcome your suggestions! You can share your ideas at one of our weekly Chi Hack Night breakout group meetings (every Tuesday), or by creating an issue on GitHub or contributing to the conversation in our slack channel (#ghost-buses-breakout in the Chi Hack Night slack workspace).

If you're new to development and looking for a good place to start, we suggest browsing through the issues in the GitHub repository and looking for those tagged with the label "good first issue". These are issues that are well-suited for beginners and can provide a great way to get started with the project.

Please note that Ghost Buses is a volunteer-run project, so please be patient as we review and integrate your contributions.

Getting started

1. First, make sure you have the npm (node package manager) installed on your system. NPM is a package manager for JavaScript projects and is required to install the necessary dependencies for Ghost Buses. You can follow along here for detailed instructions: https://docs.npmjs.com/downloading-and-installing-node-js-and-npm

2. Next, clone the repository to your local machine. You can do this using the following command:

git clone https://github.com/chihacknight/ghost-buses-frontend.git

3. Navigate to the project directory and run the following command to install the necessary dependencies:

npm install

This will install all of the packages listed in the project's package.json file and their dependencies.

4. Once the dependencies have been installed, you should be able to run the project locally. To do this, you can use the following command:

npm start

This will start the development server and open the project in your default web browser.

If you need further assistance, please join one of our weekly breakout group meetings at Chi Hack Night ask in our slack channel and/or reach out at ghostbuseschicago@gmail.com.

Communication channels

Our main communication channel is our slack channel (#ghost-buses-breakout) within the Chi Hack Night workspace. To join the Chi Hack Night workspace, you can follow the link on the Chi Hack Night website (http://chihacknight.org). Please note that Chi Hack Night is a separate organization and you will have to follow their code of conduct and all applicable rules in that space.

We (usually) meet in a zoom call as part of the weekly Chi Hack Night event. This is where all core team members discuss standing items and progress.

You can also get in touch with us by emailing ghostbuseschicago@gmail.com or messaging us on Twitter at @ghostbuses.

Summary

Thank you for your interest in the Ghost Buses project! Again, keep in mind that we're a volunteer-run project and appreciate your patience as we review and integrate your contributions.

We can't wait for you to join us in making a difference for CTA bus riders in Chicago. By tracking the reliability of CTA buses and identifying any discrepancies between scheduled and actual service levels, we can work together to improve the public transportation experience for everyone.

Let's go forth and hack!