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Contributing to PowerShell

We welcome and appreciate contributions from the community. There are many ways to become involved with PowerShell: including filing issues, joining in design conversations, writing and improving documentation, and contributing to the code. Please read the rest of this document to ensure a smooth contribution process.

New to Git?

Quick Start Checklist

Contributing to Issues

  • Review Issue Management.
  • Check if the issue you are going to file already exists in our GitHub issues.
  • If you can't find your issue already, open a new issue, making sure to follow the directions as best you can.
  • If the issue is marked as Up-for-Grabs, the PowerShell Maintainers are looking for help with the issue.

Contributing to Documentation

Contributing to documentation related to PowerShell

Please see the Contributor Guide in PowerShell/PowerShell-Docs.

Contributing to documentation related to maintaining or contributing to the PowerShell project

  • When writing Markdown documentation, use semantic linefeeds. In most cases, it means "one clause/idea per line".
  • Otherwise, these issues should be treated like any other issue in this repo.

Spellchecking documentation

Documentation are spellchecked. We make use of the markdown-spellcheck command line tool, which can be run in interactive mode to correct typos or add words to the ignore list (.spelling at the repository root).

To run the spellchecker, follow the steps as follows:

  • install Node.js (v6.4.0 or up)
  • install markdown-spellcheck by npm install -g markdown-spellcheck (v0.11.0 or up)
  • run mdspell "**/*.md" --ignore-numbers --ignore-acronyms
  • if the .spelling file is updated, commit and push it

Contributing to Code

Building and testing

Building PowerShell

Please see Building PowerShell.

Testing PowerShell

Please see PowerShell Testing Guidelines - Running Tests Outside of CI on how to test you build locally.

Finding or creating an issue

  1. Follow the instructions in Contributing to Issues to find or open an issue.
  2. Mention in the issue that you are working on the issue and ask @powershell/powershell for an assignment.

Forks and Pull Requests

GitHub fosters collaboration through the notion of pull requests. On GitHub, anyone can fork an existing repository into their own user account, where they can make private changes to their fork. To contribute these changes back into the original repository, a user simply creates a pull request in order to "request" that the changes be taken "upstream".

Additional references:

Lifecycle of a pull request

Before submitting

  • To avoid merge conflicts, make sure your branch is rebased on the master branch of this repository.
  • Many code changes will require new tests, so make sure you've added a new test if existing tests do not effectively test the code changed.
  • Clean up your commit history. Each commit should be a single complete change. This discipline is important when reviewing the changes as well as when using git bisect and git revert.

Pull request submission

Always create a pull request to the master branch of this repository.

Github-PR-dev.png

  • If you're contributing in a way that changes the user or developer experience, you are expected to document those changes. See Contributing to documentation related to PowerShell.

  • Add a meaningful title of the PR describing what change you want to check in. Don't simply put: "Fixes issue #5". A better example is: "Add Ensure parameter to New-Item cmdlet", with "Fixes #5" in the PR's body.

  • When you create a pull request, including a summary of what's included in your changes and if the changes are related to an existing GitHub issue, please reference the issue in pull request description (e.g. Closes #11). See this for more details.

  • If the change warrants a note in the changelog either update the changelog in your pull request or add a comment in the PR description saying that the change may warrant a note in the changelog. New changes always go into the Unreleased section. Keeping the changelog up-to-date simplifies the release process for Maintainers. An example:

    Unreleased
----------

* `Update-Item` now supports `-FriendlyName`.

    Please use the present tense and imperative mood when describing your changes:

    * Instead of "Adding support for Windows Server 2012 R2", write "Add support for Windows Server 2012 R2".

* Instead of "Fixed for server connection issue", write "Fix server connection issue".

    This form is akin to giving commands to the code base, and is recommended by the Git SCM developers. It is also used in the Git commit messages.

    Also, if change is related to a specific resource, please prefix the description with the resource name:

    * Instead of "New,parameter 'ConnectionCredential' in New-SqlConnection",
  write "New-SqlConnection: added parameter 'ConnectionCredential'".

Pull Request - Automatic Checks

Pull Request - Code Review

  • Roles and Responsibilities of a PR: Author, Reviewer, and Assignee

    • Reviewer and Assignee are two separate roles of a PR.
      • A Reviewer can be anyone who wants to contribute. A Reviewer reviews the change of a PR, leaves comments for the Author to address, and approves the PR when the change looks good.
      • An Assignee must be a Maintainer, who monitors the progress of the PR, coordinates the review process, and merges the PR after it's been approved. The Assignee may or may not be a Reviewer of the PR at the same time.
    • An Author is encouraged to choose Reviewer(s) and an Assignee for the PR. If no Assignee is chosen, one of the Maintainers shall be assigned to it. If no Reviewer is chosen, the Assignee shall choose Reviewer(s) as appropriate.
      • If an Author is a PowerShell Team member, then the Author is required to choose Reviewer(s) and an Assignee for the PR.
    • For a PR to be merged, it must be approved by at least one PowerShell Team member or Collaborator, so additional Reviewer(s) may be added by the Assignee as appropriate. The Assignee may also be re-assigned by Maintainers.

  • A Reviewer can postpone the code review if CI builds fail, but also can start the code review early regardless of the CI builds.

  • The Author is responsible for driving the PR to the Approved state. The Author addresses review comments, and pings Reviewer(s) to start the next iteration. If the review is making no progress (or very slow), the Author can always ask the Assignee to help coordinate the process and keep it moving.

  • Additional feedback is always welcome! Even if you are not designated as a Reviewer, feel free to review others' pull requests anyway. Leave your comments even if everything looks good; a simple "Looks good to me" or "LGTM" will suffice. This way we know someone has already taken a look at it!

  • When updating your pull request, please create new commits and don't rewrite the commits history. This way it's very easy for the reviewers to see diff between iterations. If you rewrite the history in the pull request, review could be much slower. Once the review is done, you can rewrite the history to make it prettier, if you like. Otherwise it's likely would be squashed on merge to master.

  • Once the code review is done, all merge conflicts are resolved, and the CI system build status is passing, the PR Assignee will merge your changes.

  • For more information on the the PowerShell Maintainers' process, see the documentation.

Making Breaking Changes

When you make code changes, please pay attention to these that can affect the Public Contract. For example, changing PowerShell parameters, APIs, or protocols break the public contract. Before making changes to the code, first review the breaking changes contract and follow the guidelines to keep PowerShell backward compatible.

Making Design Changes

To add new features such as cmdlets or making design changes, please follow the PowerShell Request for Comments (RFC) process.

Common Engineering Practices

Other than the guidelines for (coding, the RFC process for design, documentation and testing) discussed above, we encourage contributors to follow these common engineering practices:

  • Format commit messages following these guidelines:
Summarize change in 50 characters or less

Similar to email, this is the body of the commit message,
and the above is the subject.
Always leave a single blank line between the subject and the body
so that `git log` and `git rebase` work nicely.

The subject of the commit should use the present tense and
imperative mood, like issuing a command:

> Makes abcd do wxyz

The body should be a useful message explaining
why the changes were made.

If significant alternative solutions were available,
explain why they were discarded.

Keep in mind that the person most likely to refer to your commit message
is you in the future, so be detailed!

As Git commit messages are most frequently viewed in the terminal,
you should wrap all lines around 72 characters.

Using semantic line feeds (breaks that separate ideas)
is also appropriate, as is using Markdown syntax.

  • These are based on Tim Pope's guidelines, Git SCM submitting patches, Brandon Rhodes' semantic linefeeds, and John Gruber's Markdown syntax.

  • Don't commit code that you didn't write. If you find code that you think is a good fit to add to PowerShell, file an issue and start a discussion before proceeding.

  • Create and/or update tests when making code changes.

  • Run tests and ensure they are passing before pull request.

  • All pull requests must pass CI systems before they can be approved.

  • Avoid making big pull requests. Before you invest a large amount of time, file an issue and start a discussion with the community.

Contributor License Agreement (CLA)

To speed up the acceptance of any contribution to any PowerShell repositories, you could sign a Microsoft Contribution Licensing Agreement (CLA) ahead of time. If you've already contributed to PowerShell repositories in the past, congratulations! You've already completed this step. This a one-time requirement for the PowerShell project. Signing the CLA process is simple and can be done in less than a minute. You don't have to do this up-front. You can simply clone, fork, and submit your pull request as usual. When your pull request is created, it is classified by a CLA bot. If the change is trivial, it's classified as cla-required. Once you sign a CLA, all your existing and future pull requests will be labeled as cla-signed.