Thanks for your interest in contributing to OpenLayers. Please see the project's Code of Conduct before proceeding.
Please ask questions about using the library on Stack Overflow using the tag 'openlayers'.
When you want to get involved and discuss new features or changes, please use the mailing list.
Please use the GitHub issue tracker. Before creating a new issue, do a quick search to see if the problem has been reported already.
Look for readme.md
files! Several directories contain a readme.md
file that explains the contents of the directory and how to work with them.
See DEVELOPING.md
to learn how to get started developing.
Our preferred means of receiving contributions is through pull requests. Make sure that your pull request follows our pull request guidelines below before submitting it.
This page describes what you need to know to contribute code to OpenLayers as a developer.
Your contribution will be under our license as per GitHub's terms of service.
Before working on a pull request, create an issue explaining what you want to contribute. This ensures that your pull request won't go unnoticed, and that you are not contributing something that is not suitable for the project. Once a core developer has set the pull request accepted
label on the issue, you can submit a pull request. The pull request description should reference the original issue.
Your pull request must:
-
Follow OpenLayers's coding style.
-
Pass the integration tests run automatically by the Continuous Integration system.
-
Address a single issue or add a single item of functionality.
-
Contain a clean history of small, incremental, logically separate commits, with no merge commits.
-
Use clear commit messages.
-
Be possible to merge automatically.
Please submit separate pull requests for separate issues. This allows each to be reviewed on its own merits.
The commit history explains to the reviewer the series of modifications to the code that you have made and breaks the overall contribution into a series of easily-understandable chunks. Any individual commit should not add more than one new class or one new function. Do not submit commits that change thousands of lines or that contain more than one distinct logical change. Trivial commits, e.g. to fix lint errors, should be merged into the commit that introduced the error. See the Atomic Commit Convention on Wikipedia for more detail.
git apply --patch
and git rebase
can help you create a clean commit
history.
Reviewboard.org
and Pro GIT have
explain how to use them.
Commit messages should be short, begin with a verb in the imperative, and contain no trailing punctuation. We follow https://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html for the formatting of commit messages.
Git commit message should look like:
Header line: explaining the commit in one line
Body of commit message is a few lines of text, explaining things
in more detail, possibly giving some background about the issue
being fixed, etc etc.
The body of the commit message can be several paragraphs, and
please do proper word-wrap and keep columns shorter than about
74 characters or so. That way "git log" will show things
nicely even when it's indented.
Further paragraphs come after blank lines.
Please keep the header line short, no more than 50 characters.
Occasionally other changes to main
might mean that your pull request cannot
be merged automatically. In this case you may need to rebase your branch on a
more recent main
, resolve any conflicts, and git push --force
to update
your branch so that it can be merged automatically.