Create contributing guidelines

[ryanwholey]

We should include some contributing guidelines to replace the "coming soon" portion of our docs!

Probably a CONTRIBUTING.md file would be good and then link it from the README.md.

Things to include:

• semantic commit messages i think this is it?
• open an issue to discuss non trivial changes first
• commit message outline?
• update docs and tests

[benmvp]

Yeah we need lots of docs! 😄 CONTRIBUTING.md is a good start.

Here's the resource for the commit message: https://github.com/angular/angular.js/blob/master/DEVELOPERS.md#-git-commit-guidelines

[kwelch]

Should we use something like commitizen to help work flow/force consistency in commit messages.

[benmvp]

@kwelch so I'd love to use it for PRs. But my understanding is that it works on every commit, which would be annoying because we probably make a bunch of local commits before putting up the PR. And since we only do rebase merges of PRs, the only title that really matters is the title of the PR...

[ryanwholey]

Britecharts has set up templating for issues and pull requests which has worked really well for us! I would be in favor of adding something like that here.

Here's a link to one of the prs setting it up in britecharts

[benmvp]

Sounds like you should take this issue then 😉

[ryanwholey]

so down 👍

[kwelch]

@benmvp Good point, that would be very annoying locally. The Templates are a great approach. On react-slingshot, we have a PR template that includes a checklist, it is for both the submitter and the reviewer.

[benmvp]

That one is nice too @kwelch! I feel like we can merge them together to ensure enough information is included in the PRs. But the real key is making sure the title format is followed (as well as mentioning a breaking change)

[kwelch]

Is there a GitHub bot that will check the PR title similar to what we have in phab? Or can we build that into the travis script?

This looks like it could be helpful in verifying and validating both messages and PR titles. https://github.com/uber-workflow/probot-app-pr-title

[benmvp]

I was thinking of going the approach of running a script in travis that would fail the build if the PR wasn't the right format. Maybe somehow using the underlying CLI from commitizen to run against the Travis PR title.

This bot is interesting. Not quite sure how we'd run it in travis. The docs are sparse to say the least...

I think it might be worthwhile to move this discussion about PR title validation to a separate issue and leave this to be just around the Contributing guidelines

[rwholey-eb]

@BenAtEventbrite +1 on moving to a new issue, i think for this pr i'm going to add a CONTRIBUTING.md an issues template and a pr template (about halfway done) and we can work out the rest in that separate issue. sound good?

[benmvp]

I know we're no longer talking about commit title validation in Travis, but I stumbled upon http://marionebl.github.io/commitlint/#/guides-ci-setup which may help us and I need somewhere to put it :)