CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing Guidelines

Patches and Pull requests:

If you want to contribute a change to LuCI, please either send a patch using git send-email or open a "pull request" against the openwrt/luci repository.

Regardless of whether you send a patch or open a pull request, please try to follow these rules:

• Have a useful subject prefixed with the component name (E.g.: "luci-mod-admin-full: fix wifi channel selection on multiple STA networks")
• Shortly explain the changes made and - if applicable - the reasoning behind them
• Commit message of each commit should include a Signed-off-by line (See https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/submittingpatches-tomerge#sign_your_work)

In case you like to send patches by mail, please use the LuCI mailinglist or the OpenWrt Development List.

If you send via the OpenWrt list, include a [luci] tag in your subject line. For general information on patch submission, follow the OpenWrt patch submission guideline.

Advice on pull requests:

Pull requests are the easiest way to contribute changes to git repos at Github. They are the preferred contribution method, as they offer a nice way for commenting and amending the proposed changes.

• You need a local "fork" of the Github repo.

• Use a "feature branch" for your changes. That separates the changes in the pull request from your other changes and makes it easy to edit/amend commits in the pull request. Workflow using feature_x as the example:

  • Update your local git fork to the tip (of the master, usually)
  • Create the feature branch with git checkout -b feature_x
  • Edit changes and commit them locally
  • Push them to your Github fork by git push -u origin feature_x. That creates the feature_x branch at your Github fork and sets it as the remote of this branch
  • When you now visit Github, you should see a proposal to create a pull request

• If you later need to add new commits to the pull request, you can simply commit the changes to the local branch and then use git push to automatically update the pull request.

• If you need to change something in the existing pull request (e.g. to add a missing signed-off-by line to the commit message), you can use git push -f to overwrite the original commits. That is easy and safe when using a feature branch. Example workflow:

  • Checkout the feature branch by git checkout feature_x
  • Edit changes and commit them locally. If you are just updating the commit message in the last commit, you can use git commit --amend to do that
  • If you added several new commits or made other changes that require cleaning up, you can use git rebase -i HEAD~X (X = number of commits to edit) to possibly squash some commits
  • Push the changed commits to Github with git push -f to overwrite the original commits in the "feature_x" branch with the new ones. The pull request gets automatically updated

If you have commit access:

• Do NOT use git push --force.
• Use Pull Requests if you are unsure and to suggest changes to other developers.

Gaining commit access:

• Commit access will be granted to responsible contributors who have made useful pull requests and / or feedback or patches to this repository or OpenWrt in general. Please include your request for commit access in your next pull request or ticket.

Release Branches:

• Branches named openwrt-xx.yy (e.g. openwrt-18.06) are release branches.
• These branches are built with the respective OpenWrt release and are created during the release stabilisation phase.
• Please ONLY cherry-pick or commit security and bug-fixes to these branches.
• Do NOT add new packages and do NOT do major upgrades of packages here.
• If you are unsure if your change is suitable, please use a pull request.