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How to contribute

We would love to have your help. Before you start working however, please read and follow this short guide.

Reporting Issues and Asking Questions

We prefer issues to be discussed first in the community forum and when confirmed, then an issue can be opened in the issue tracker.

When opening an issue, please provide as much information as possible. Mention the version of Jitsi Meet, Jicofo and JVB you are using, and explain (as detailed as you can) how the problem can be reproduced.

Please ask any general and implementation specific questions on the community forum for support.

Code contributions

Visit the issue tracker to find a list of open issues that need attention.

The Developer Guide will help you to setup a development environment to start working on the Jitsi Meet applications.

Contributor License Agreement​

While the Jitsi projects are released under the Apache License 2.0, the copyright holder and principal creator is 8x8. To ensure that we can continue making these projects available under an Open Source license, we need you to sign our Apache-based contributor license agreement as either a corporation or an individual. If you cannot accept the terms laid out in the agreement, unfortunately, we cannot accept your contribution.

Creating Pull Requests​

  • Fork the repo.
  • Create a new topic branch for your changes based off the master branch with a suitable name.
  • Perform one logical change per pull request.
  • Maintain a clean list of commits, squash them if necessary.
  • Rebase your topic branch on top of the master branch before creating the pull request. Never merge master, always rebase.
  • Commits should have prefix indicating what they do is it feature, a fix or a translation update. This helps with automatted release notes generation. Prefix the commits with feat(feature name) , fix(feature name), etc.

For 8x8 employees​

  • Don't link any internal resources such as Jira issues, this is an Open Source project

Coding style​

Comments​

  • Comments documenting the source code are required.

    • Comments from which documentation is automatically generated are not subject to case-by-case decisions. Such comments are used, for example, on types and their members. Examples of tools which automatically generate documentation from such comments include JSDoc, Javadoc, Doxygen.

    • Comments that are not automatically processed are strongly encouraged. They are subject to case-by-case decisions. Such comments are often observed in function bodies.

  • Comments should be formatted as proper English sentences. Such formatting pays attention to, for example, capitalization and punctuation.

Duplication​

  • Don't copy-paste source code. Reuse it. Be careful not to create bad abstractions just to reuse a small chunk of code, however.

Formatting​

  • Line length is limited to 120 characters for JavaScript, Java, and Kotlin code.

  • Sort by alphabetical order to make the addition of new entities as easy as looking a word up in a dictionary. Otherwise, one risks duplicate entries (with conflicting values in the cases of key-value pairs). For example:

    • JavaScript: Within an import of multiple names from a module, sort the names in alphabetical order. (Of course, the default name stays first as required by the import syntax.)

      import {
          DOMINANT_SPEAKER_CHANGED,
          JITSI_CLIENT_CONNECTED,
          JITSI_CLIENT_CREATED,
          JITSI_CLIENT_DISCONNECTED,
          JITSI_CLIENT_ERROR,
          JITSI_CONFERENCE_JOINED,
          MODERATOR_CHANGED,
          PEER_JOINED,
          PEER_LEFT,
          RTC_ERROR
      } from './actionTypes';

    • JavaScript: Within a group of imports (e.g. groups of imports delimited by an empty line maybe: third-party modules, then project modules, and eventually the private files of a module), sort the module names in alphabetical order.

      import React, { Component } from 'react';
      import { connect } from 'react-redux';

    • Java: Use package imports (package.*) and DO NOT import classes themselves.

  • Java: Opening braces MUST be on their line (especially those beginning a method).

  • Use 4 spaces to indent everything. Instruct your IDE not to use tabs under any circumstance and replace them with spaces.

  • Do not use double negatives when naming properties, variables, or methods/functions.

Naming​

  • An abstraction should have one name within the project and across multiple projects. For example:

    • The instance of lib-jitsi-meet's JitsiConnection type should be named connection or jitsiConnection in jitsi-meet, not client.

    • The class ReducerRegistry should be defined in ReducerRegistry.js and its imports in other files should use the same name. Don't define the class Registry in ReducerRegistry.js and then import it as Reducers in other files.

  • The names of global constants (including ES6 module-global constants) should be written in uppercase with underscores to separate words. For example, BACKGROUND_COLOR.

  • The underscore character at the beginning of a name signals that the respective variable, function, or property is non-public i.e. private, protected, or internal. In contrast, the lack of an underscore at the beginning of a name signals public API.

TypeScript​

Feature layout​

When adding a new feature, this would be the usual layout.

react/features/sample/
├── actionTypes.ts
├── actions.ts
├── components
│   ├── AnotherComponent.tsx
│   └── OneComponent.tsx
├── middleware.ts
└── reducer.ts

All new features must be written in TypeScript. When working on an old feature, converting the JavaScript files to TypeScript is encouraged.

The middleware must be imported in react/features/app/ specifically in middlewares.any, middlewares.native.js or middlewares.web.js where appropriate. Likewise for the reducer.

In general, we want to avoid index files. We prefer using the full path for imports. However, there are cases where a common file (used by both web and native, eg. actions.ts) needs to import from components (from /native or from /web, depending on the platform the build is for). In this case, we create two index files in components/: index.native.ts and index.web.ts and export just the component we need. The common file should then be imported from components/index.

This has not always been the case and the entire codebase hasn't been migrated to this model but new features should follow this new layout.

When working on an old feature, adding the necessary changes to migrate to the new model is encouraged.

Avoiding bundle bloat​

When adding a new feature it may trigger a build failure due to the increased bundle size. We have safeguards in place to avoid bundles growing disproportionately. While there are legitimate reasons for increasing the limits, please analyze the bundle first to make sure no unintended dependencies have been included, causing the increase in size.

First, make a production build with bundle-analysis enabled:

npx webpack -p --analyze-bundle

Then open the interactive bundle analyzer tool:

npx webpack-bundle-analyzer build/app-stats.json

Kotlin​

For Kotlin code we use the standard convention and limit line length to 120 characters. We use ktlint to enforce formatting.