CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

This document outlines general patterns and and conventions for contributing to the project. For in-depth documentation on Kad, see the doc/ directory.

Coding Style

Kad adheres to Felix's Node.js Style Guide.

Conventions

As you may have noticed, Kad takes a very OOP approach, making use of the prototype chain to abstract shared behaviors and extend things that are often different between projects. A good example of this is how transports inherit from kad.RPC so that a Node and it's Router can communicate with peers using any transport layer.

This design is central to Kad's architecture and should be followed when adding new features.

New classes are placed in the lib/ directory and should be constructed so that they can be created with or without the new keyword. This is as simple as adding a condition to the first line of your constructor function:

function MyClass(options) {
  if (!(this instanceof MyClass)) {
    return new MyClass(options);
  }
  // write class definition here...
}

You should also make the best use of JSDoc comments as shown throughout the source code.

Test Coverage

At the time of writing, Kad has almost complete code coverage (>95%) through it's test suite. It is important to never decrease coverage, so be sure to include tests for any new code.

You can run the coverage report with:

npm run coverage

Linting

To help maintain consistent expectations for code quality and enforcing these conventions, there is an included .jshintrc file. Most editors support using this to alert you of offending code in real time but, if your editor does not, you can run the linter with:

npm run linter

Alternatively, the linter will run as part of the test suite as well, which can be executed with:

npm test

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Have fun and be excellent!