CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing Guidelines

To ensure smooth collaboration, please follow these guidelines.

Table of Contents

• Branching Strategy
  • Creating a Feature Branch
  • Pull Requests
• Commit Message Conventions
  • Types
  • Examples
• Tooling

Branching Strategy

We follow a Feature Branch Workflow strategy. This means:

• Main Branch: The main branch always reflects the production-ready state.
• Development Branch: The develop branch serves as the main integration branch. All feature branches are merged into this branch for testing before being merged into main.
• Feature Branches: For each new feature or bug fix, create a new branch off develop. Use descriptive branch names that reflect the nature of the work being done.

Creating a Feature Branch

When working on a new feature or bug fix:

1. Ensure you are on the develop branch: git checkout develop
2. Create a new branch: git checkout -b feature/your-feature-name
3. Implement your changes in this branch

Pull Requests

When submitting a Pull Request:

1. Ensure your branch is up to date with develop: git pull origin develop
2. Rebase your branch if necessary to incorporate the latest changes: git rebase develop
3. Submit your Pull Request targeting the develop branch
4. Provide a clear description of the changes made and any relevant information for reviewers
5. Link the Pull Request with the relevant Project, Assignee, Development Issue and Milestone
6. When merging a Pull Request, please do Squash and Merge to merge all commits into a single commit

To learn more about Git, check out Learn Git Branching.

Commit Message Conventions

We use Conventional Commits for our commit messages. Each commit message consists of a type, a brief description, and an optional body.

A commit message follows this format:

<type>: <description>

[optional body]

Types

• feat: A new feature
• fix: A bug fix
• docs: Documentation changes
• refactor: Code refactoring
• style: Code style changes (formatting, indentation)
• test: Adding or modifying tests
• chore: Changes to the build process, dependencies, or other non-code modifications

Examples

• feat: adds user authentication feature

• fix: resolves issue with form validation

• With a body:

  docs: update README with usage instructions
  
  - removes unneeded comments and adds a `TOC`
  - cleans up wording for the `Install w/ Linux` section

Tooling

To maintain code quality and consistency, consider installing the following tools:

• Auto-formatters: We are using swiftformat-for-xcode. To install, checkout Format On Save — Xcode / Swift.