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Contributing changes

Warning

If you use an LLM (Large Language Model, like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, or Llama) to make any kind of contribution then you will immediately be banned without recourse. See [CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md][coc] for more information.

Bug reports, bug fixes, and documentation improvements are always welcome. Please open an issue or create a pull request with your report, fix, or improvement.

If you want to make a more significant change, please first open an issue to discuss the change that you want to make. Dave Cheney gives a good rationale as to why this is important.

All changes are made via pull requests. In your pull request, please make sure that:

  • All existing tests pass. You can ensure this by running make test.

  • There are appropriate additional tests that demonstrate that your PR works as intended.

  • The documentation is updated, if necessary. For new features you should add an entry in assets/chezmoi.io/docs/user-guide/ and a complete description in assets/chezmoi.io/docs/reference/. See the website developer guide for instructions on how to build and view a local version of the documentation. By default, chezmoi will panic if a flag is undocumented or a long help is missing for a command. You can disable this panic during development by setting the environment variable CHEZMOIDEV to ignoreflags=1,ignorehelp=1. Once you have documented the command and its flags, run make generate to generate the embedded documentation.

  • All generated files are up to date. You can ensure this by running make generate and including any modified files in your commit.

  • The code is correctly formatted. You can ensure this by running make format.

  • The code passes golangci-lint. You can ensure this by running make lint.

  • The commit messages adhere to the conventional commits specification, with the following additional requirements:

    • The first character of the commit message is uppercase, e.g:

      chore: Fix typo in test

      The purpose of this is to maintain consistency in chezmoi's release notes, which are generated directly from the commit messages.

    • The commits do not have scopes (e.g. chore(scope): Message is invalid).

    The following criteria can be used to determine the commit type:

    • fix: bug fixes in chezmoi code
    • feat: extending an existing feature or adding a new feature
    • docs: adding to or updating the documentation
    • chore: small changes, such as fixing a typo, correcting grammar (including in documentation), or anything not covered by the above

    Examples can be found in the commit history.

  • Commits are logically separate, with no merge or "fixup" commits.

  • The branch applies cleanly to master.