How to contribute

Before diving into code it might be worth reading through the Developing on Bedrock documentation, which contains useful information and links to our coding guidelines for Python, Django, JavaScript and CSS.

Git workflow

When you want to start contributing, you should create a branch from master. This allows you to work on different project at the same time:

$ git checkout master

$ git checkout -b topic-branch

To keep your branch up-to-date, assuming the mozilla repository is the remote called mozilla:

$ git fetch mozilla

$ git checkout master

$ git merge mozilla/master

$ git checkout topic-branch

$ git rebase master

If you need more Git expertise, a good resource is the Git book.

Once you’re done with your changes, you’ll need to describe those changes in the commit message.

Git commit messages

Commit messages are important when you need to understand why something was done.

  • First, learn how to write good git commit messages.

  • All commit messages must include a bug number. You can put the bug number on any line, not only the first one.

  • If you use the syntax bug xxx, Github will reference the commit into Bugzilla. With fix bug xxx, it will even close the bug once it goes into master.

If you’re asked to change your commit message, you can use these commands:

$ git commit --amend

-f is doing a force push because you modified the history

$ git push -f my-remote topic-branch

Submitting your work

In general, you should submit your work with a pull request to master. If you are working with other people or you want to put your work on a demo server, then you should be working on a common topic branch.

Once your code has been positively reviewed, it will be deployed shortly after. So if you want feedback on your code but it’s not ready to be deployed, you should note it in the pull request, or use a Draft PR. Also make use of an appropriate label, such as Do Not Merge.

Squashing your commits

Should your pull request contain more than one commit, sometimes we may ask you to squash them into a single commit before merging. You can do this with git rebase.

As an example, let’s say your pull request contains two commits. To squash them into a single commit, you can follow these instructions:

$ git rebase -i HEAD~2

You will then get an editor with your two commits listed. Change the second commit from pick to fixup, then save and close. You should then be able to verify that you only have one commit now with git log.

To push to GitHub again, because you “altered the history” of the repo by merging the two commits into one, you’ll have to git push -f instead of just git push.

Server architecture

Demos

On-demand demos

  • URLs: Demo instances can also be spun up on-demand by pushing a branch to the mozilla bedrock repo that matches a specific naming convention (the branch name must start with demo/). Jenkins will then automate spinning up a demo instance based on that branch. For example, pushing a branch named demo/feature would create a demo instance with the following URL: https://bedrock-demo-feature.oregon-b.moz.works/

  • Bedrock locales: dev repo

  • Bedrock Git branch: any branch named starting with demo/

Note

Deployed demo instances are not yet automatically cleaned up when branches are deleted, so to avoid lots of instances piling up it is currently recommended to try and limit a single demo instance per developer, reusing a branch such as demo/<your_username>.

Dev

Stage

  • URL: http://www.allizom.org/

  • Bedrock locales: prod repo

  • Bedrock Git branch: prod, deployed on git push with date-tag

Production

  • URL: http://www.mozilla.org/

  • Bedrock locales: prod repo

  • Bedrock Git branch: prod, deployed on git push with date-tag

You can check the currently deployed git commit by checking https://www.mozilla.org/revision.txt.

Pushing to production

We’re doing pushes as soon as new work is ready to go out.

After doing a push, those who are responsible for implementing changes need to update the bugs that have been pushed with a quick message stating that the code was deployed.

If you’d like to see the commits that will be deployed before the push run the following command:

$ ./bin/open-compare.py

This will discover the currently deployed git hash, and open a compare URL at github to the latest master. Look at open-compare.py -h for more options.

We automate pushing to production via tagged commits (see Push to prod branch (tagged))