CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Love Redwood and want to get involved? You’re in the right place!

Before interacting with the Redwood community, please read and understand our Code of Conduct.

Table of Contents

• Contributing
  • Local Development
    • Install Dependencies
    • Copy and Watch
      • Specifying a RW_PATH
    • Local Package Registry Emulation
      • Setting Up and Running a Local NPM Registry
      • Publishing a Package
      • Installing Published Packages in Your Redwood App
  • Running Your Redwood App's Local Server(s)
  • Integration tests
  • Releases
    • Troubleshooting
  • CLI Reference: redwood-tools
    • redwood-tools (alias rwt)
    • copy (alias cp)
    • copy:watch (alias cpw)
    • fix-bins (alias fix)
    • install (alias i)

Local Development

As a Redwood user, you're already familiar with the codebase yarn create redwood-app creates. Here we'll call this codebase a "Redwood App"--it’s the fullstack-to-Jamstack solution you already know and love.

As a contributor, you'll have to gain familiarity with one more codebase: the Redwood Framework. The Redwood Framework lives in the monorepo redwoodjs/redwood; it contains all the packages that make Redwood Apps work the way they do.

While you'll be making most of your changes in the Redwood Framework, you'll probably want to see your changes “running live" in one of your own Redwood Apps or in one of our example apps. We offer two workflows for making this possible: "copy and watch", which has some restrictions, and "local package registry emulation", which doesn't.

How to choose which one to use? If you've installed or upgraded a dependency, use the "local package registry emulation" workflow; otherwise, use "copy and watch".

Both workflows use redwood-tools (alias rwt), Redwood's companion CLI development tool.

Install Dependencies

Before running the application for the first time you should run yarn in the root directory to install the necessary dependencies.

cd redwood
yarn

Copy and Watch

Are you on Windows? If so, you most likely first have to install rsync. Also, unfortunately you can't use "copy and watch". You'll have to manually run yarn rwt cp ../path/to/redwood when you've made changes to the Redwood Framework (this is tracked in issue #701).

First, build-and-watch files in the Redwood Framework for changes:

cd redwood
yarn build:watch

@redwoodjs/api: $ nodemon --watch src -e ts,js --ignore dist --exec 'yarn build'
@redwoodjs/core: $ nodemon --ignore dist --exec 'yarn build'
create-redwood-app: $ nodemon --ignore dist --exec 'yarn build'
@redwoodjs/eslint-plugin-redwood: $ nodemon --ignore dist --exec 'yarn build'

Then, copy-and-watch those changes into your Redwood App or example app (here, example-invoice):

cd example-invoice
yarn rwt copy:watch ../path/to/redwood

Redwood Framework Path:  /Users/peterp/Personal/redwoodjs/redwood
Trigger event:  add
building file list ... done

Now any changes made in the framework will be copied into your app!

Specifying a RW_PATH

You can create a RW_PATH environment variable so you don't have to specify the path in the copy:watch command.

On Linux

Add the following line to your ~/.bashrc:

export RW_PATH=”$HOME/path/to/redwood/framework”

Where /path/to/redwood/framework is replaced by the path to your local copy of the Redwood Framework.

Then, in your Redwood App or example app, you can just run:

yarn rwt copy:watch

And see your changes copied!

On Mac

Add the following line to your ~/.bash_profile:

export RW_PATH=”$HOME/path/to/redwood/framework”

Where /path/to/redwood/framework is replaced by the path to your local copy of the Redwood Framework.

Then, in your Redwood App or example app, you can just run:

yarn rwt copy:watch

And see your changes copied!

On Windows [Todo: please contribute a PR if you can help add instructions here.]

Local Package Registry Emulation

Sometimes you'll want to test the full package-development workflow: building, publishing, and installing in your Redwood App. We facilitate this using a local NPM registry called Verdaccio.

Setting Up and Running a Local NPM Registry

First, install Verdaccio:

yarn global add verdaccio

Then, in your local copy of the Redwood Framework, run:

./tasks/run-local-npm

This starts Verdaccio (http://localhost:4873) with our configuration file.

Publishing a Package

To build, unpublish, and publish all the Redwood packages to your local NPM registry with a "dev" tag, run:

./tasks/publish-local

Note: this script is equivalent to running:

npm unpublish --tag dev --registry http://localhost:4873/ --force
npm publish --tag dev --registry http://localhost:4873/ --force

You can build a particular package by specifying the path to the package: ./tasks/publish-local ./packages/api.

For example, if you've made changes to the @redwoodjs/dev-server package, you would run:

./tasks/publish-local ./packages/dev-server

Installing Published Packages in Your Redwood App

The last step is to install the package into your Redwood App. The CLI command redwood-tools (alias rwt) makes installing local NPM packages easy:

yarn rwt install @redwoodjs/dev-server

Note: this is equivalent to running:

rm -rf <APP_PATH>/node_modules/@redwoodjs/dev-server
yarn upgrade @redwoodjs/dev-server@dev --no-lockfile --registry http://localhost:4873/

Running Your Redwood App's Local Server(s)

When developing Redwood Apps, you’re probably used to running both the API and Web servers with yarn rw dev and seeing your changes included immediately. But for local package development, your changes won’t be included automatically--you'll need to manually stop/start the respective server to include them.

In this case you might find it more convenient to run the servers for each of the yarn workspaces independently:

yarn rw dev api
yarn rw dev web

Integration tests

We're using Cypress to test the steps that we recommend in the tutorial. Run the command by doing the following:

yarn build
./tasks/test-tutorial

This creates a new project in a tmp directory using yarn create redwood-app ... Once installed, it then upgrades the project to the most recent canary release, which means it will use the current code in the main branch. Once the upgrade is complete (and successful), it will start Cypress for the E2E tests.

./tasks/test-turial /path/to/app

Use this path/to/app option to run the same Cypress E2E tests against a local project. In this case, the command will not upgrade the project to the canary release — it will use the project's installed packages. Chose this option if you have modified code (and packages) you want to test locally.

Windows Not Supported: The command for this is written in bash and will not work on Windows.

Releases

To publish a new version of Redwood to NPM run the following commands:

yarn lerna version --force-publish
yarn lerna publish from-package

The changes the version of all the packages (even those that haven't changed) and publishes it to NPM.

Troubleshooting

If something went wrong you can use yarn lerna publish from-package to publish the packages that aren't already in the registry.

CLI Reference: redwood-tools

This CLI Reference section covers the redwood-tools command options. For redwood options, see the CLI Reference on redwoodjs.com.

redwood-tools (alias rwt)

Redwood's companion CLI development tool. You'll be using this if you're contributing to Redwood.

yarn rwt <command>

Command	Description
copy	Copy the Redwood Framework path to this project.
copy:watch	Watch the Redwood Framework path for changes and copy them over to this project.
fix-bins	Fix Redwood symlinks and permissions.
install	Install a package from your local NPM registry.

copy (alias cp)

Copy the Redwood Framework path to this project.

yarn rwt cp [RW_PATH]

You can avoid having to provide RW_PATH by defining an environment variable on your system. See Specifying a RW_PATH.

copy:watch (alias cpw)

Watch the Redwood Framework path for changes and copy them over to this project.

yarn rwt cpw [RW_PATH]

You can avoid having to provide RW_PATH by defining an environment variable on your system. See Specifying a RW_PATH.

fix-bins (alias fix)

Fix Redwood symlinks and permissions.

yarn rwt fix

The Redwood CLI has the following binaries:

• redwood
• rw
• redwood-tools
• rwt
• dev-server

When you're contributing, the permissions of these binaries can sometimes get mixed up. This makes them executable again.

install (alias i)

Install a package from your local NPM registry.

yarn rwt i <packageName>

You'll use this command if you're testing the full package-development workflow. See Local Package Registry Emulation.