How to contribute to rbokeh

Thank you for sharing your code with the rbokeh. We appreciate your contribution!

Join the mailing list

If you’re not already on the Bokeh mailing list, take a minute to join.

Check the issue tracker

Before you write too much code, check the open issues in the rbokeh issue tracker to see if someone else has already filed an issue related to your work or is already working on it. If not, go ahead and open a new issue.

Announce your work on the mailing list or issue tracker

Shoot us a quick email on the mailing list or note on the issue tracker letting us know what you’re working on. There will likely be people on the list who can give you tips about where to find relevant source or alert you to other planned changes that might effect your work.

If the work you’re proposing makes substantive changes to rbokeh, you may be asked to attach a design document to your issue in the issue tracker. This document should provide a high-level explanation of your design, clearly define the goal of the new design, etc. This document is meant to save you time as it allows the team a chance to provide feedback on the proposes changes. The document also allows the team to prepare for large changes to the code base. We welcome change but also want to ensure that code quality is kept high.

Submit your pull request

Github provides a nice overview on how to create a pull request.

Some general rules to follow:

  • Do your work in a fork of the rbokeh repo.
  • Create a branch for each feature/bug in rbokeh that you’re working on. These branches are often called “feature” or “topic” branches.
  • Use your feature branch in the pull request. Any changes that you push to your feature branch will automatically be shown in the pull request. If your feature branch is not based off the latest master, you will be asked to rebase it before it is merged.
  • If your pull request fixes an issue, reference the issue so that it will be closed when your pull request is merged
  • Keep your pull requests as small as possible. Large pull requests are hard to review. Try to break up your changes into self-contained and incremental pull requests, if need be, and reference dependent pull requests, e.g. “This pull request builds on request #92. Please review #92 first.”
  • The first line of commit messages should be a short (<80 character) summary, followed by an empty line and then, optionally, any details that you want to share about the commit.
  • Include unit tests with your pull request. We love tests and use Travis CI to check every pull request and commit. We use the testthat R package for running unit tests. See code in the inst/tests for examples.