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Contributing changes

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 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.