leiningen/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Leiningen is the most active open-source Clojure project. We welcome potential contributors and do our best to try to make it easy to help out. Contributors who have had a single patch accepted may request commit rights as well as a free sticker.

Discussion occurs both in the #leiningen channel on Freenode and on the mailing list. To join the mailing list, simply email leiningen@librelist.org; your first message to that address will subscribe you without being posted.

Please report issues on the GitHub issue tracker or the mailing list. Personal email addresses are inappropriate for bug reports. Simpler issues appropriate for first-time contributors looking to help out are tagged "newbie".

Patches are preferred as patches from git format-patch on the mailing list or as GitHub pull requests. Please use topic branches when sending pull requests rather than committing directly to master in order to minimize unnecessary merge commit clutter.

Leiningen is mirrored at Gitorious and tested on Travis.

Codebase

The definitions of the various tasks reside in src/leiningen in the top-level project. The underlying mechanisms for things like project.clj parsing, classpath calculation, and subprocess launching are implemented inside the leiningen-core subproject.

See the readme for the leiningen-core library and doc/PLUGINS.md for more details on how Leiningen's codebase is structured.

While there is a test suite, it's not terribly thorough, so don't put too much trust in it. Patches which add test coverage for the functionality they change are especially welcome.

Bootstrapping

You don't need to "build" Leiningen per se, but when you're developing on a checkout you will need to get its dependencies in place. Just use a stable release of Leiningen to run lein do install, classpath .lein-bootstrap in the leiningen-core directory.

If you don't have a stable lein installed, simply check out the stable branch and copy bin/lein to somewhere on your $PATH, then switch your branch back.

If you want to use your development copy for everyday usage, symlink bin/lein to somewhere on your $PATH. You'll want to rename your stable installation to keep them from interfering; typically you can name that lein2 or lein-stable.

When the dependencies change you may have to do rm .lein-classpath in the project root, though in most cases this can be done automatically.

Using bin/lein alone from the master branch without a full checkout is not supported. If you want to just grab a shell script to work with, use the stable branch.