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Contributing Guidelines

Thank you for your interest in contributing to the GA4GH Starter Kit, we appreciate it!

There are 2 ways to contribute to the development of the Starter Kit:

  1. By submitting an issue, which begins a discussion about changes to be made to the codebase.
  2. By submitting a pull request, which is a concrete proposal of a code change that solves an issue.

Issues​

The GA4GH Starter Kit is split across multiple Github repositories, each with their own issue page. Each issue page is a forum to discuss both major and minor issues related to developing the codebase. It also serves as a means for collaborating with interested groups and contributors that will ultimately drive improvements of the Starter Kit.

Examples of the types of issues that can be submitted are:

  • Attributes to be added, revised, or deleted in certain data models
  • Modifications to the behavior of an API endpoint
  • Performance-related issues of the API (e.g. slow API calls)
  • Reported bugs that need to be fixed

See the Issue / Pull request table for links to the issue page for each Starter Kit codebase.

Pull Requests​

Code contribution to the Starter Kit repositories is done via Github pull requests. For reference, here is an overview from Github on how to create a pull request.

Some general rules to follow for the Starter Kit repositories:

  • Create an issue in Github to track your work and start a conversation. Make a note of the number, you'll need it when naming your branch below.
  • Fork the repository to your personal or organizational Github namespace. Please do not track feature branches on the ga4gh fork.
  • We follow GitFlow, which means:
    • We use a feature branch strategy. Feature branches must be started off of the ga4gh:develop branch, and pull requests are to be made to the ga4gh:develop branch.
    • Release branches are started off the ga4gh:develop branch. After the release has been made, the release branch is merged into both ga4gh:main and ga4gh:develop.
  • Create a "feature" branch for each update that you're working on. The branches should start with "feature/issue-[number]-[description]". For example "feature/issue-123-improve-endpoint".
  • When you're happy with your feature branch, make a Pull Request to the ga4gh:develop fork and branch. Provide a helpful description of the changes made and link back to the original issue.
  • Keep pull requests as small as possible, as large pull requests are hard to review. Try to make your branches/pull requests self-contained and incremental.
  • The first line of commit messages should be a short (<80 character) summary, followed by an empty line and then any details you want to share about the commit.

See the Issue / Pull request table for links to the pull request page for each Starter Kit codebase.

Travis CI​

We use Travis CI for automated testing and builds. If you enable Travis to run on your fork of any Starter Kit repo, you will see automated builds.

Automated builds will also run for a pull request raised to the ga4gh fork: once when the PR is created, and each time there is a commit/push made to the incoming branch of the PR.

Releases​

From time to time the group will make a release. This is done with the GitFlow release process, which involves creating a "release-[version]" branch off of ga4gh:develop. Once the release codebase is tested (and any bugs fixed as necessary), artifacts are pushed to Github and Dockerhub, and the release branch is merged back into main and develop. The release branch is removed after a successful GitFlow release.

The following table links out to the issue and pull request pages for each Starter Kit codebase:

NameIssuesPull Requests
GA4GH Starter Kit DRSIssuesPull Requests
GA4GH Starter Kit WESIssuesPull Requests
GA4GH Starter Kit Passport UIIssuesPull Requests
GA4GH Starter Kit Passport BrokerIssuesPull Requests
GA4GH Starter Kit Data ConnectIssuesPull Requests
GA4GH Starter Kit UIIssuesPull Requests
GA4GH Starter Kit UtilsIssuesPull Requests
GA4GH Starter Kit CommonIssuesPull Requests
GA4GH Starter Kit DocsIssuesPull Requests