contribution-help.md

Contribution Help

This guide is intended as a supplement to help folks who may be new to coding, the GitHub ecosystem, or the collaboration process; it includes additional details to the process described in CONTRIBUTING.md. If you run into issues that aren't covered here, please feel free to add the steps you took and documentation you consulted to resolve them! It may be a big help to a future coder out there.

Detailed instructions for tool installation and machine setup are outside the scope of this guide, but please feel free to reach out if you need assistance!

• If you're unsure whether you have the right tools installed, you can confirm you have these installed by running the following in your terminal: node --version, npm --version, and git --version

  • if you do not see a version number as output, you will need to install the relevant tool, see links in CONTRIBUTING.md (note: npm is generally part of the node installation and does not need to be installed separately)

• You can confirm your remotes are properly configured by running git remote -v; this should show your fork as the 'origin' repository and the parent as the 'upstream' repository, as in the following screenshot:

• If you are not acquainted with git, see general setup and practices in GitHub's docs. As mentioned above, a detailed Git tutorial is outside the scope of this guide, but feel free to reach out for assistance if you'd like to contribute but aren't sure how to get started.

• Some notes on adding changes and making commits:

  • Add changes to your branch with git add -A
  • Commit changes with git commit -m 'your commit message here'
    • Commit messages should describe your changes succinctly, for example, git commit -m 'add contributor documentation'