PeerTube/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md

Welcome to the contributing guide for PeerTube

Interested in contributing? Awesome!

This guide will present you the following contribution topics:

• Translate
• Give your feedback
• Write documentation
• Improve the website
• Develop
  • Prerequisites
  • Online development
  • Server side
  • Client side
  • Client and server side
  • Testing the federation of PeerTube servers
  • Unit tests
  • Emails
• Plugins & Themes

Translate

You can help us to translate the PeerTube interface to many languages! See the documentation to know how.

Give your feedback

You don't need to know how to code to start contributing to PeerTube! Other contributions are very valuable too, among which: you can test the software and report bugs, you can give feedback on potential bugs, features that you are interested in, user interface, design, decentralized architecture...

Write documentation

You can help to write the documentation of the REST API, code, architecture, demonstrations.

For the REST API you can see the documentation in /support/doc/api directory. Then, you can just open the openapi.yaml file in a special editor like http://editor.swagger.io/ to easily see and edit the documentation. You can also use redoc-cli and run redoc-cli serve --watch support/doc/api/openapi.yaml to see the final result.

Some hints:

• Routes are defined in /server/controllers/ directory
• Parameters validators are defined in /server/middlewares/validators directory
• Models sent/received by the controllers are defined in /shared/models directory

Improve the website

PeerTube's website is joinpeertube.org, where people can learn about the project and how it works – note that it is not a PeerTube instance, but rather the project's homepage.

You can help us improve it too!

It is not hosted on GitHub but on Framasoft's own GitLab instance, FramaGit: https://framagit.org/framasoft/peertube/joinpeertube

Develop

Always talk about features you want to develop by creating/finding and commenting the issue tackling your problem before you start working on it, and inform the community that you begin coding by claiming the issue.

Once you are ready to show your code to ask for feedback, submit a draft Pull Request. Once you are ready for a code review before merge, submit a Pull Request. In any case, please link your PR to the issues it solves by using the GitHub syntax: "fixes #issue_number".

Prerequisites

First, you should use a server or PC with at least 4GB of RAM. Less RAM may lead to crashes.

1. Make sure that you have followed the steps to install the dependencies.
2. Install parallel to be able to run tests.
3. Fork the Github repository.
4. Run the following commands.

$ git clone https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
$ cd PeerTube
$ git remote add me git@github.com:YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/PeerTube.git
$ yarn install --pure-lockfile

Note that development is done on the develop branch. If you want to hack on Peertube, you should switch to that branch. Also note that you have to repeat the yarn install --pure-lockfile command.

When you create a new branch you should also tell to use your repo for upload not default one. To do just do:

$ git push --set-upstream me <your branch name>

Then, create a postgres database and user with the values set in the config/default.yaml file. For instance, if you do not change the values there, the following commands would create a new database called peertube_dev and a postgres user called peertube with password peertube:

# sudo -u postgres createuser -P peertube
Enter password for new role: peertube
# sudo -u postgres createdb -O peertube peertube_dev

Then enable extensions PeerTube needs:

$ sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE EXTENSION pg_trgm;" peertube_dev
$ sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE EXTENSION unaccent;" peertube_dev

In dev mode, administrator username is root and password is test.

Online development

You can get a complete PeerTube development setup with Gitpod, a free one-click online IDE for GitHub:

Server side

You can find a documentation of the server code/architecture here.

To develop on the server-side:

$ npm run dev:server

Then, the server will listen on localhost:9000. When server source files change, these are automatically recompiled and the server will automatically restart.

Client side

You can find a documentation of the client code/architecture here.

To develop on the client side:

$ npm run dev:client

The API will listen on localhost:9000 and the frontend on localhost:3000. Client files are automatically compiled on change, and the web browser will reload them automatically thanks to hot module replacement.

Client and server side

The API will listen on localhost:9000 and the frontend on localhost:3000. File changes are automatically recompiled, injected in the web browser (no need to refresh manually) and the web server is automatically restarted.

$ npm run dev

Testing

Your code contributions must pass the tests before they can be merged. Tests ensure most of the application behaves as expected and respect the syntax conventions. They will run upon PR submission as part of our CI, but running them beforehand yourself will get you faster feedback and save CI runner time for others.

PeerTube mainly features backend and plugin tests, found in server/tests.

Unit tests

Create a PostgreSQL user with the same name as your username in order to avoid using the postgres user.

Then, we can create the databases (if they don't already exist):

$ sudo -u postgres createuser you_username --createdb --superuser
$ npm run clean:server:test

Build the application and run the unit/integration tests:

$ npm run build -- --light
$ npm test

If you just want to run 1 test (which is what you want to debug a specific test rapidly):

$ TS_NODE_FILES=true npm run mocha -- --exit -r ts-node/register -r tsconfig-paths/register --bail server/tests/api/videos/single-server.ts

While testing, you might want to display a server's logs:

NODE_APP_INSTANCE=1 NODE_ENV=test npm run parse-log -- --level debug | less +GF

Instance configurations are in config/test-{1,2,3,4,5,6}.yaml. Note that only instance 2 has transcoding enabled.

Testing the federation of PeerTube servers

Create a PostgreSQL user with the same name as your username in order to avoid using the postgres user. Then, we can create the databases (if they don't already exist):

$ sudo -u postgres createuser you_username --createdb
$ createdb -O peertube peertube_test{1,2,3}

Build the application and flush the old tests data:

$ npm run build -- --light
$ npm run clean:server:test

This will run 3 nodes:

$ npm run play

Then you will get access to the three nodes at http://localhost:900{1,2,3} with the root as username and test{1,2,3} for the password.

Instance configurations are in config/test-{1,2,3}.yaml.

Emails

To test emails with PeerTube:

• Run mailslurper
• Run PeerTube using mailslurper SMTP port: NODE_CONFIG='{ "smtp": { "hostname": "localhost", "port": 2500, "tls": false } }' NODE_ENV=test npm start

Plugins & Themes

See the dedicated documentation: https://docs.joinpeertube.org/#/contribute-plugins