Electron Forge is a community-driven project. As such, we welcome and encourage all sorts of contributions. They include, but are not limited to:
- Constructive feedback
- Questions about usage
- Bug reports / technical issues
- Documentation changes
- Feature requests
- Pull requests
We strongly suggest that before filing an issue, you search through existing issues to see if it has already been filed by someone else.
This project is a part of the Electron ecosystem. As such, all contributions to this project follow Electron's code of conduct where appropriate.
If you have questions about usage, we encourage you to visit one of the several community-driven sites.
Troubleshooting suggestions can be found in the support documentation.
We use the label help wanted
in the issue tracker to denote fairly-well-scoped-out bugs or feature requests that the community
can pick up and work on. If any of those labeled issues do not have enough information, please feel
free to ask constructive questions. (This applies to any open issue.)
The easiest way to test changes to Forge during development is by symlinking your local packages to a sample Forge project.
To create symlinks for your local Forge packages, use the yarn link:prepare
command after
building Forge.
yarn build
yarn link:prepare
Then, you want to initialize a new project with the electron-forge init
command (which is the
underlying CLI command for create-electron-app
). To use the symlinks you created in the last step,
pass in the LINK_FORGE_DEPENDENCIES_ON_INIT=1
environment variable.
You can choose to run this command via your local build as shown below or run the production init for versions 6.0.1 and up.
LINK_FORGE_DEPENDENCIES_ON_INIT=1 node path/to/forge/packages/api/cli/dist/electron-forge-init.js my-app
To link an existing project to your local Forge packages, use the yarn link:prepare
command as listed
above, and then run the following command in your project:
yarn link @electron-forge/core --link-folder=path/to/forge/.links
Forge commands executed in your my-app
sample project should reflect any changes in your local
Forge build. (Make sure to run yarn build:fast
or yarn build
between code changes.)
When changing the API documentation, here are some rules to keep in mind.
- The first line:
- should end with a period
- should be in imperative mood (e.g., "Create" instead of "Creates")
- First line should not be the function's "signature"
- The first word of the first line:
- should be properly capitalized
- should not be "This"
For changes to the website (electronforge.io), please file issues/pull requests at its separate repository.
An example of how to make your own code edits:
git clone https://github.com/electron/forge
cd forge
# Installs all dependencies
yarn
# Builds all the TS code
yarn build
Please ensure that all changes are committed using semantic commit messages.
The Electron Forge repository has a lot of tests, some of which take a decent amount of time to run.
yarn test
Here are some things to keep in mind as you file pull requests to fix bugs, add new features, etc.:
- GitHub Actions are used to make sure that the project builds packages as expected on the supported platforms, using supported Node.js versions, and that the project conforms to the configured coding standards.
- Unless it's impractical, please write tests for your changes. This will help us so that we can spot regressions much easier.
- If your PR changes the behavior of an existing feature, or adds a new feature, please add/edit the package's documentation.
- Commit messages and pull request titles should adhere to the Conventional Commits format.
- One of the philosophies of the project is to keep the code base as small as possible. If you are adding a new feature, think about whether it is appropriate to go into a separate Node module, and then be integrated into this project.
- Please do not bump the version number in your pull requests, the maintainers will do that. Feel free to indicate whether the changes are a breaking change in behavior.
- If you are continuing the work of another person's PR and need to rebase/squash, please retain the attribution of the original author(s) and continue the work in subsequent commits.
This guide is for maintainers who have:
- Push access to the
electron/forge
repository. - Collaborator access to the
@electron-forge
packages on npm.
- Switch to the tip of the
main
branch withgit switch main && git pull
. - Run tests locally with
yarn test
. - Check that the latest CI run passed on
main
on GitHub. - Remove all untracked files and directories from your checkout with
git clean -fdx
. - Install dependencies with
yarn install
.
- Log into npm with
npm login
. - Run the
yarn lerna:publish
command. - Enter your npm account's time-based one-time password (TOTP).
The lerna:publish
script will automatically increment the next package version based on the
Conventional Commits standard. From there, it does two things:
- It creates a tagged commit that bumps the version number in
package.json
at the root and package levels and pushes the commit and tag to GitHub. - It publishes every
@electron-forge/
package to npm.
- Go to the repo's New Release page.
- Select tag you just published.
- Target the
main
branch. - Automatically generated release notes against the previous Forge release.
Occasionally, we add new packages to the @electron-forge
monorepo. Before publishing, ensure that all
version numbers for both the package itself and its dependencies match the current version of Electron
Forge (e.g. if the current version is v7.0.0
and you want to add the package in v7.1.0
, please publish
v7.0.0
first).
Then, manually publish the package to the current Forge version using npm publish --access public
.
Once this version is published, you can continue with the normal release process as usual.
Note
To verify that the publish configuration is correct, first run npm publish --dry-run
before publishing.
We do this manual publish step first to avoid errors with attempting to publish a non existent package with Lerna.