Contribution Guidelines

Dasher is an open source project and we love getting patches and contributions to make Dasher and its docs even better.

Contributing to Dasher

The Dasher project itself lives in http://github.com/dasher-project/redash. The website lives at http://github.com/dasher-project/website

Contributor License Agreement

Contributions to this project must be accompanied by a Contributor License Agreement. You (or your employer) retain the copyright to your contribution; this simply gives us permission to use and redistribute your contributions as part of the project. Head over to https://cla.developers.google.com/ to see your current agreements on file or to sign a new one.

You generally only need to submit a CLA once, so if you’ve already submitted one (even if it was for a different project), you probably don’t need to do it again.

Code reviews

All submissions, including submissions by project members, require review. We use GitHub pull requests for this purpose. Consult GitHub Help for more information on using pull requests.

Previewing your changes

As Dasher is a theme rather than a site, you can’t serve the theme directly to check your changes work. Instead use your updated local theme in a local copy of the Dasher example site (copy or make your changes in the themes/Dasher directory) and preview from there. Alternatively, clone the Dasher theme repo and test your changes in a local copy of this site, as described below.

Community guidelines / Code of Conduct

This project follows a Code of Conduct

Creating issues

Alternatively, if there’s something you’d like to see in Dasher (or if you’ve found something that isn’t working the way you’d expect), but you’re not sure how to fix it yourself, please create an issue.

Contributing to these docs

This user guide is a Dasher site that uses the Hugo static site generator. We welcome updates to the docs!

We use Netlify to manage the deployment of the site and provide previews of doc updates. The instructions here assume you’re familiar with basic GitHub workflows.

Quick start with Netlify

1. Fork the Dasher repo on GitHub: this site’s files live in the userguide subdirectory.
2. Make your changes and send a pull request (PR).
3. If you’re not yet ready for a review, add “WIP” to the PR name to indicate it’s a work in progress. (Don’t add the Hugo property “draft = true” to the page front matter, because that prevents the auto-deployment of the content preview described in the next point.)
4. Wait for the automated PR workflow to do some checks. When it’s ready, you should see a comment like this: deploy/netlify — Deploy preview ready!
5. Click Details to the right of “Deploy preview ready” to see a preview of your updates.
6. Continue updating your doc and pushing your changes until you’re happy with the content.
7. When you’re ready for a review, add a comment to the PR, and remove any “WIP” markers.

Updating a single page

If you’ve just spotted something you’d like to change while using the docs, Dasher has a shortcut for you:

1. Click Edit this page in the top right hand corner of the page.
2. If you don’t already have an up to date fork of the project repo, you are prompted to get one - click Fork this repository and propose changes or Update your Fork to get an up to date version of the project to edit. The appropriate page in your fork is displayed in edit mode.
3. Follow the rest of the Quick start with Netlify process above to make and preview your changes.

Previewing your changes locally

If you want to run your own local Hugo server to preview your changes as you work:

1. Follow the instructions in Getting started to install Hugo and any other tools you need.

2. Fork the Dasher repo into your own project, then create a local copy using git clone. Don’t forget to use --recurse-submodules or you won’t pull down some of the code you need to generate a working site.

   git clone --recurse-submodules --depth 1 https://github.com/google/Dasher.git
   

3. Change to the userguide directory and run the following Hugo command to build the site and start the Hugo server. Note that you need the themesDir flag because the site files are inside the theme repo.

   cd userguide
   hugo server --themesDir ../..
   

   By default your site will be available at http://localhost:1313/. Now that you’re serving your site locally, Hugo will watch for changes to the content and automatically refresh your site.

4. Continue with the usual GitHub workflow to edit files, commit them, push the changes up to your fork, and create a pull request.

Creating an issue

If there’s something you’d like to see in the docs, but you’re not sure how to fix it yourself, please create an issue in this repository. You can also create an issue about a specific page by clicking the Create Issue button in the top right hand corner of the page.