Contributing to Neroli's Lab

Thank you for considering contributing to Neroli's Lab! We welcome contributions from everyone, whether you're fixing bugs, adding features, improving documentation, or helping with community support.

🤝 How to Contribute

Types of Contributions

• 💻 Code Contributions: Submit bug fixes, features, or optimizations
• 🎨 Design: UI/UX improvements and user experience enhancements
• 📚 Documentation: Improve player-facing guides (source in guides/), this contributor documentation site, API docs, or code comments
• ✨ Feature Requests: Suggest new features or improvements
• 🐛 Bug Reports: Help us identify and fix issues
• 🧪 Testing: Write tests or help with quality assurance

📝 Contribution Workflow

1. Issue First

For significant changes:

• Discuss the approach with maintainers before starting
• Create an issue describing the feature or bug
• Check existing issues to avoid duplication

For small fixes (typos, small bugs), you can directly create a pull request.

2. Follow existing code conventions

While we're always open to improvement suggestions and welcome these discussions, please adhere to existing/negotiated conventions during development.

3. Always test your code changes

There are over 2000 examples in our codebase to look at and a very welcoming Discord server. Please write tests for your code changes.

Example test structure:

import { describe, it, expect } from 'vitest';
import { SNEASEL } from './berry-pokemon';

describe('SNEASEL', () => {
  it('should confirm that Sneasel is the best Pokémon', () => {
    const result = SNEASEL.isBestPokemon();
    expect(result).toBe(true);
  });
});

Also please ensure all tests pass before submitting:

# Lints the entire repository, usually not needed if you have the workspace properly set up
npm run lint

# Component-specific tests
cd common && npm run test
cd backend && npm run test
cd frontend && npm run test

4. Commit Messages

We follow Conventional Commits:

# Feature
git commit -m "feat(frontend): add ingredient calculator widget"

# Bug fix
git commit -m "fix(backend): resolve authentication timeout issue"

# Documentation
git commit -m "docs: update API documentation for team endpoints"

# Breaking change
git commit -m "feat(api)!: change team calculation response format"

Types:

• feat: New feature
• fix: Bug fix
• docs: Documentation
• style: Code style changes
• refactor: Code refactoring
• test: Adding tests
• chore: Maintenance tasks

5. Pull Request

1. Push your branch

   git push origin feature/your-feature-name

2. Create Pull Request

   • Use a descriptive title
   • Add screenshots for UI changes
   • Rebase to main branch before submitting (see Linear History & Rebasing guide)

🏗️ Component-Specific Guidelines

For detailed development guidelines specific to each component, please refer to their respective documentation:

• Frontend Guidelines - Vue.js, Vuetify, and frontend-specific practices
• Backend Guidelines - Node.js, API design, and backend-specific practices
• Common Library Guidelines - Shared library development practices
• Player guides (Markdown under guides/content/, VitePress theme in guides/.vitepress/) have their own non-technical README for contributors and maintainer notes.

📋 Code Review Process

What We Look For

• Functionality: Does it work as intended?
• Code Quality: Is it readable and maintainable?
• Testing: Are there appropriate tests?
• Documentation: Is it properly documented?
• Performance: Does it impact performance?
• Security: Are there any security concerns?

💬 Community

Join our Discord community for support and discussions, we can also help you select issues to work on

🎉 Recognition

Contributors are recognized in:

• Announcements: Significant contributions are generally released with credit in the announcements
• Discord: Frequent contributors have the possiblity of being promoted to the extended development team

Community Guidelines

• Be Respectful: Treat everyone with respect
• Be Constructive: Provide helpful feedback
• Be Patient: Maintainers are volunteers
• Follow Code of Conduct: See CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

Next Steps

1. Check the Development Setup for development workflows
2. Join our Discord community for support and discussions, we can also help you select issues to work on
3. Pick an issue from either our feedback website or GitHub to start contributing

Thank you for helping make Neroli's Lab better! 🌟