CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

First off, thank you for considering contributing to Active Admin. It's people like you that make Active Admin such a great tool.

1. Where do I go from here?

If you've noticed a bug or have a question that doesn't belong on the mailing list or Stack Overflow, the first step is to do a quick search to see if someone else in the community has already created a ticket. If not, then go ahead and make one!

2. Fork & create a branch

If this is something you think you can fix, then fork Active Admin and create a branch with a descriptive name.

A great branch name would be (where issue #325 is the ticket you're working on):

git checkout -b 325-add-japanese-translations

3. Get the test suite running

Install the development dependencies:

bundle install

Now you should be able to run the entire suite using:

rake test

Which will generate a rails application in spec/rails to run the tests against.

If your tests are passing locally but they're failing on Travis, reset your test environment:

rm -rf spec/rails && bundle update

4. Implement your fix or feature

At this point, you should be ready to make your changes! Don't hesitate to ask for help; everyone is a beginner at first :)

5. View your changes in a Rails application

Active Admin is meant to be used by humans, not cucumbers. So make sure to take a look at your changes in a browser.

To boot up a test rails application, use the provided script:

script/local server

This will generate a Rails application at test-rails-app/ that uses your copy of Active Admin.

If you have any Bundler issues, call the use_rails script then prepend the version of rails you would like to use in an environment variable:

script/use_rails 4.0.0
RAILS=4.0.0 script/local server

You should now be able to open http://localhost:3000/admin and view a test environment.

If you need to perform any other commands on the test application, use the local script. For example to boot the rails console:

script/local console

Or to migrate the database:

script/local rake db:migrate

6. Run tests against major supported rails versions

Once you've implemented your code, got the tests passing, previewed it in a browser, you're ready to test it against multiple versions of Rails.

rake test:major_supported_rails

This runs our test suite against a couple of major versions of Rails. Travis does essentially the same thing when you open a Pull Request. We care about quality, so your PR won't be merged until all tests pass.

7. Make a Pull Request

At this point, you should switch back to your master branch and make sure it's up to date with Active Admin's master branch:

git remote add upstream git@github.com:gregbell/active_admin.git
git checkout master
git pull upstream master

Then update your feature branch from your local copy of master, and push it!

git checkout 325-add-japanese-translations
git rebase master
git push --set-upstream origin 325-add-japanese-translations

Finally, go to GitHub and make a Pull Request :D

8. Keeping your Pull Request updated

If a maintainer asks you to "rebase" your PR, they're saying that a lot of code has changed, and that you need to update your branch so it's easier to merge.

To learn more about rebasing in Git, there are a lot of good resources, but here's the suggested workflow:

git checkout 325-add-japanese-translations
git pull --rebase upstream master
git push -f 325-add-japanese-translations