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🤝 How to Contribute

We greatly appreciate your willingness to contribute ❤️ Before you start working however, please take a moment to read and follow this brief 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 of the appropriate project on GitHub.

  • Feel free to report any bugs, ask for new features or anything else you need help with. When opening an issue, please provide as much information as possible.

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

🪲 Bug Reports and Other Issues​

For bugs please follow these steps:

  • Provide Detailed Information: Include versions of Jitsi Meet, Jicofo, and JVB.

  • Description of the Issue: Clearly explain the problem encountered.

  • Reproduction Steps: Provide step-by-step instructions to recreate the issue.

  • Expected Behavior: Describe the expected outcome when using the software.

  • Actual Behavior: Explain what actually happened, including any error messages.

💟 Feature Requests​

If you have an idea for a new feature or something you'd like to see improved in Jitsi, here's how you can let us know:

  • Describe the feature: Specify the desired functionality.
  • Provide examples: Share similar features from other apps.
  • Explain importance: Justify the feature's relevance.
  • Considerations: Assess potential challenges.
  • Additional details: Include specific preferences.

Code Contributions

  • Visit the issue tracker (Jitsi Meet's for example) to find a list of open issues that need attention.

  • Discovered a bug or have a feature request and know how to fix it? Excellent! Keep reading 🔍

  • 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 repository to your GitHub account.
  • Create a new branch for your changes, based on the master branch. Choose a descriptive name for your branch.
  • Make one logical change per pull request to keep things organized.
  • Keep your commit history clean and concise. If necessary, squash multiple commits into one.
  • Rebase your branch onto the latest changes in the master branch before submitting the pull request. Never merge master, always rebase.

📝 Commit messages​

Jitsi projects follow the Conventional Commits spec, while making the scope mandatory.

That is, we use feat(feature name) add some functionality as opposed to feat: add some functionality. As projects grow large, scoping down changes is helpful.

This is a non-exhaustive list of types of commits:

[
  'build',
  'chore',
  'ci',
  'docs',
  'feat',
  'fix',
  'perf',
  'refactor',
  'revert',
  'style',
  'test'
];

As for what constitutes a "feature", that can vary across projects. "Subsystem" is another valid analogy. In Jitsi Meet, for example, the feature name can be the feature where you made the changes: react/features/<this>. In lib-jitsi-meet, the module: modules/<this>.

Use your judgement and look into the commit history when in doubt.

❗️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.

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.

✅ Code Reviews​

  • Submit Your Contribution: After completing your work, submit your contribution.
  • Draft PRs for Discussion: Consider opening a draft PR early to discuss your approach with the team before fully implementing it. Draft PRs facilitate early collaboration, ensuring efficient progress.
  • Assign Reviewers: Appropriate reviewers are assigned based on the affected code base and expertise required for changes.
  • Review Process: Reviewers will carefully examine your code, checking for adherence to coding standards, correctness, performance and potential issues.
  • Feedback and Iteration: If any issues or suggestions are identified during the review, you'll receive feedback from the reviewers. Address any comments or concerns raised and make necessary revisions to your code.
  • Automated tests: Once the PR is in a good state, a team member will trigger the automated tests. The PR needs to merge cleanly on top of master, and test failures or issues discovered at this stage will need to be addressed before the PR is approved for merging.
  • Approval: Once the code meets the required standards, passes the review, and tests, it will be approved for merging into the main codebase.

🎉 Issue Closing​