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Contributing

So you’ve got an awesome idea to throw into Jekyll. Great! Please keep the following in mind:

  • If you’re creating a small fix or patch to an existing feature, just a simple test will do. Please stay in the confines of the current test suite and use Shoulda and RR.
  • If it’s a brand new feature, make sure to create a new Cucumber feature and reuse steps where appropriate. Also, whipping up some documentation in your fork’s site would be appreciated, and once merged it will be transferred over to the main site, jekyllrb.com.
  • If your contribution changes any Jekyll behavior, make sure to update the documentation. It lives in site/docs. If the docs are missing information, please feel free to add it in. Great docs make a great project!
  • Please follow the GitHub Ruby Styleguide when modifying Ruby code.
  • Please do your best to submit small pull requests. The easier the proposed change is to review, the more likely it will be merged.
  • When submitting a pull request, please make judicious use of the pull request body. A description of what changes were made, the motivations behind the changes and any tasks completed or left to complete will also speed up review time.
Contributions will not be accepted without tests

If you’re creating a small fix or patch to an existing feature, just a simple test will do.

Test Dependencies

To run the test suite and build the gem you’ll need to install Jekyll’s dependencies. Jekyll uses Bundler, so a quick run of the bundle command and you’re all set!

$ bundle

Before you start, run the tests and make sure that they pass (to confirm your environment is configured properly):

$ bundle exec rake test
$ bundle exec rake features

Workflow

Here’s the most direct way to get your work merged into the project:

  • Fork the project.
  • Clone down your fork:
git clone git://github.com/<username>/jekyll.git
  • Create a topic branch to contain your change:
git checkout -b my_awesome_feature
  • Hack away, add tests. Not necessarily in that order.
  • Make sure everything still passes by running rake.
  • If necessary, rebase your commits into logical chunks, without errors.
  • Push the branch up:
git push origin my_awesome_feature
  • Create a pull request against jekyll/jekyll:master and describe what your change does and the why you think it should be merged.

Updating Documentation

We want the Jekyll documentation to be the best it can be. We’ve open-sourced our docs and we welcome any pull requests if you find it lacking.

You can find the documentation for jekyllrb.com in the site directory of Jekyll’s repo on GitHub.com.

All documentation pull requests should be directed at master. Pull requests directed at another branch will not be accepted.

The Jekyll wiki on GitHub can be freely updated without a pull request as all GitHub users have access.

If you want to add your plugin to the list of plugins, please submit a pull request modifying the plugins page source file by adding a link to your plugin under the proper subheading depending upon its type.

Gotchas

  • If you want to bump the gem version, please put that in a separate commit. This way, the maintainers can control when the gem gets released.
  • Try to keep your patch(es) based from the latest commit on jekyll/jekyll. The easier it is to apply your work, the less work the maintainers have to do, which is always a good thing.
  • Please don’t tag your GitHub issue with [fix], [feature], etc. The maintainers actively read the issues and will label it once they come across it.
Let us know what could be better!

Both using and hacking on Jekyll should be fun, simple, and easy, so if for some reason you find it’s a pain, please create an issue on GitHub describing your experience so we can make it better.