CUKEBOT / Gherkin-27.0.0 / CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Cucumber

First off - thank you for contributing to Cucumber!

Overview

This monorepo contains various components (libraries) used by Cucumber, such as:

Each top level directory is the name of a cucumber package, and each directory underneath is an implementation language for that package.

The Cucumber implementations themselves live in separate Git repositories:

The libraries in this monorepo are implemented in many different languages (Java, TypeScript, Ruby, C# and a few more).

Building

You have a few options for building this repo as outlined below.

Building on Docker

You need a lot of various tools to build this repo, and to make this easy we have created a docker image with all the required build tools installed. To use this you need Docker installed, and a bash shell on your host OS:

make docker-run
make clean
NO_CROSS_COMPILE=1 make

You can leave out NO_CROSS_COMPILE=1 to cross-compile go executables, but this will slow down your build.

The build will take a while the first time you run it, but subsequent calls to make should be a lot faster because downloaded files will be cached, and make will only rebuild packages that you have changed.

The git repo is mounted as a volume in the running Docker container, so you can edit files with your favourite IDE/editor on the host OS.

If you are only making changes to a particular package, you can build just that package by changing into the relevant directory and running make.

The benefit of building in Docker is that you don't need to install anything (except for Docker). The downside is that the build is slower than running on your host OS.

Building on MacOS/Linux

If you contribute regularly to Cucumber we recommend installing all the required tools on your host OS. You can find a list of those tools by looking at Dockerfile.

The build process is the same as within Docker, except that you run your commands on the host OS.

make clean
make

Building on CircleCI

Whenever you push code to this repo, or create a pull request, CircleCI will build your code.

CircleCI will build the packages in parallel, so a full build will complete a lot faster than a local build.

Building a subset

Package names are the top level directory names, and language names are the directory names underneath. For instance, html-formatter package has implementations for java, javascript, and ruby languages.

Define PACKAGES and/or LANGUAGES to only build a subset of packages / languages.

To build html-formatter package for javascript language:

PACKAGES=html-formatter LANGUAGES=javascript make

To build html-formatter package for javascript and ruby languages:

PACKAGES=html-formatter LANGUAGES="javascript ruby" make

To build all packages for javascript language:

LANGUAGES=javascript make

To build messages and gherkin packages for all languages:

PACKAGES="messages gherkin" make

Packages have to be built in a particular order. This order is defined in Makefile. If you set PACKAGES when running make, be careful at keeping that order to prevent any build error.

Using yarn instead of npm

If you prefer to use yarn instead of npm:

NPM=yarn LANGUAGES=javascript make

Troubleshooting

Errors during Node builds

You may encounter timeouts or errors when building some npm modules. If this happens, try building the module with yarn (NPM=yarn - see above).

If you're still experiencing errors or timeouts, try replacing file:../.. dependencies in package.json with the latest release of the package. If you do, please do not commit that change.