Contribution Guidelines

There will always be a need for developers to help us improve SpongeAPI. There is no such thing as a perfect project and things can always be improved. If you are a developer and are interested in helping then please do not hesitate. Just make sure you follow our guidelines.

Note

Developers who show determination and consistency in their contributions to the project may be invited to join the Sponge Staff by Team Leaders, at their discretion. There is no formal application process. Please don’t ask to be staff, we’ll ask you.

General steps

1. Setup your workspace as described in Preparing for Development.
2. Make sure you’re familiar with Git and GitHub. If your knowledge needs a refresh, take a look here: How to Git(Hub)
3. Check for existing issues in the SpongeAPI, SpongeCommon, SpongeForge, SpongeVanilla, and SpongeDocs repositories. There is possibly someone else already working on the same thing. You can also check issues marked with “help wanted” for existing issues we need your help with.

Note

Please don’t submit pull requests for small, non-functional changes such as fixing typos or renaming variable names. Instead, you can:

• join #spongedev on IRC (irc.esper.net) and we’ll change it together with the other smaller changes.
• Join our Discord Server and post on the #dev channel. Discord and IRC are linked, so don’t worry. We won’t miss your message!
• You can also add it to our list of Minor Issues on GitHub.

4. If the issue requires a bigger change you may want to submit the issues without the necessary changes first, so we can confirm the issue and know that you’re working on fixing it. You should also create a draft pull request or comment with ~wip so we can already start reviewing them.
5. Fork the project, clone it and make your changes in an extra branch.
6. Test your changes (make sure it compiles!), commit and push them to your fork.
7. Submit the pull request with a short summary what you’ve changed and why it should be changed in that way.
8. If you make additional changes, push new commits to your branch. Do not squash your changes, that makes it extremely hard to see what you’ve changed compared to the previous version of your pull request.
9. Make sure your PR is rebased to the latest changes of the branch you’re intending to merge it into. If you need help rebasing it, just ask!

Tip

If you’re unsure which branch you should base your work on, read about our Repository Branch Layout before submitting your PR.