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RocketChat / Rocket.Chat

The communications platform that puts data protection first.
https://rocket.chat/
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Requesting documentation (hello world) for development #8287

Closed vfseanm closed 6 years ago

vfseanm commented 7 years ago

I'm new to Rocket Chat, and really wish there was documentation on how you develop and test the system day-to-day. E.g:

I'm basically wishing there were a hello world development guide. Having trouble getting started and I'm sure others are too. Thanks!

ms10398 commented 7 years ago

I would like to work on it How should I start Can anyone guide me as this is a new project to me.

ohadleshno commented 7 years ago

I would like to work on it too.

MrBunBuns commented 7 years ago

Me and my team are working on Rocket.Chat for our school project and would like to help you since we experienced the same difficulty when we first started. Just let us know if you would like us to and we will get started for you right away!

abhishek71994 commented 7 years ago

I would like to contribute as well. This would help me get up and running in making Open Source Contributions.

alanbuxey commented 7 years ago

okay - so the first point of call would be to create a list of requirements that are not already covered (or need improving) on the official pages

https://rocket.chat/docs

are the docs required for admins of the system, developers or end users of the system ?

abhishek71994 commented 7 years ago

So basically replicate the list in the Rocket.chat docs?

parulc7 commented 7 years ago

I would like to work on this project too.

vfseanm commented 7 years ago

What's missing: So the docs on contributing and developing don't give any instructions on how to begin - it just says "You can find Rocket.Chat repositories here. If you see some issue you are willing to work on, just comment on it."

An example of what would help developers get started:

The page can also include some beginner material like I mentioned initially:

JSzaszvari commented 7 years ago

Pre-Warning: I'm not a Rocket.Chat Staff member, just a community contributor. Nothing in this post should be taken as coming from the Rocket.Chat team.

Alright, Pre-Apologies to anyone annoyed by this post. Not in a great mood tonight and ended up ranting:

This doesn't appear to actually be a problem with Rocket.Chat but a misunderstanding of some basics and other technologies that arnt necessarily specific to Rocket.Chat

The first observation that I've made here is that there is a expectation for the Rocket.Chat staff to teach you how to use the underlying technologies that it's built with. So far I've seen

Now I dont mean to pick on anyone, Just trying to encourage people and show them that there are better places out there to be asking these questions. I'll address some specific posts here - Once again, not trying to put down or pick on anyone, just trying to get a better understanding of whats being asked. So I'll answer the questions in a blunt and quick fashion.

@vfseanm

how you fork Rocket Chat.

The exact same way you fork the other 26 million projects on GitHub. If you go to https://guides.github.com/ you'll find a main topic called "Forking Projects - Ever find a project on GitHub that you want to work on? Find out how you can contribute with Forking." - https://guides.github.com/activities/forking/

On that same page is also subtopics "Making and pushing changes" and "Making a Pull Request"

Here's how you pull and deploy your fork locally (commands).

See my comment above.

Here's how you push the change to your forked github repo.

Same answer again.

Here's how you submit a Pull Request and what to expect.

And again, all covered in every Git 101 Getting Started Guide on the internet.

In the rare case that they follow a different process for PR's, whats the worst that can happen by simply trying? I would submit the PR and if something needs to be done differently or didnt follow correct procedure, the Repository Maintainers/People who look at the PR's are usually more than happy to give you a helping hand on how you can get your change into the project.

With warning that the build is super slow and links to what to do if it breaks. What changes require a rebuild? Is there any building necessary for mongo DB? Is there a test DB?

If you are contributing to a project as large as this one for example, In my opinion there would be a certain level of assumed knowledge about the underlying technologies that it uses. What i'm getting at here is that none of the 3 issues raised above strike me as issues with Rocket.Chat or the Project, but a lack of knowledge with MeteorJS.

All of those questions can be answered on this single page in the MeteorJS docs - https://docs.meteor.com/commandline.html

With warning that the build is super slow and links to what to do if it breaks.

Any MeteorJS project this large is going to take a long time to build. This isnt a RC issue at all. There's millions of things that could break, The issue could be with your build environment, a mistake you made when making a change, etc etc. But there is no issue that I have yet to come across where you copy and paste the error into google, and 50x solutions come up all over StackOverflow and GitHub.

What changes require a rebuild?

As per the MeteorJS docs. Pretty much every single change that you make to a package that you want reflected on the front end needs a rebuild.

Is there any building necessary for mongo DB? Is there a test DB?

This functionality is built into the MeteorJS build/run process as per the documentation I just linked.

This is the same across the board, for any project that uses Meteor. See the commands on the page I linked above: "meteor run", "meteor mongo", "meteor build", "meteor npm"

All of the above knowledge is transferrable between any Meteor project hosted on GitHub.

You said:

So the docs on contributing and developing don't give any instructions on how to begin - it just says "You can find Rocket.Chat repositories here. If you see some issue you are willing to work on, just comment on it."

Well... Yes? That is what it says, It's not usually a case of "First we will teach you how to use git, then we will teach you Meteor basics" - It really is a case of "Here is 'Project X' - We use A, B and C as underlying technologies/the platform is built on those. Feel free to contribute anything back" - It's not their job to ensure you have a basic understanding of the tech that it's built with, as they are delivering a software package built off that stuff, not a 101 into using git and 101 programming course or teaching people how to manage meteor applications.

You said this too:

I'm basically wishing there were a hello world development guide.

Well it's your lucky day, Because there is thousands of them.

Just google "Git 101", or "Building a meteorJS project" and there is a wealth of knowledge out there.

The specifics on contributing to this project and the workflow are all really well documented here - https://docs.rocket.chat/developer-guides/branches-and-releases/

Testing is covered here - https://docs.rocket.chat/developer-guides/testing/

The reason why i complain like this is that the Rocket.Chat team are using standards based technologies where the knowledge is transferrable between any project that uses similar tooling.

And the main point I am trying to make here is that the Rocket.Chat team can either:

A) Teach people the basics of using Git, Using Meteor and Contributing back, which would leave little time do to actual work on the project or B) They can focus on improving RocketChat, Delivering more features, Fixing Bugs, and just generally being awesome at what they do.

I strongly feel it's not their job to waste time on documenting this stuff considering there is so so so so much great documentation on this out there already, and it would be a huge waste of time rehashing it for this particular project, as theres nothing special about the way RocketChat works.

If you are looking for the "exact commands" that need to be run, then there is no better documentation than a script with the actual build process thats sitting in the root of the repository here: https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/blob/develop/example-build-run.sh

Go follow a few MeteorJS tutorials out there on the web, Follow some online git tutorials/walkthroughs then I guarantee, before you know it, you'll feel like a expert when jumping into a project like this - You'll be confident and excited that you can make a impact.

It's unfair on the Rocket.Chat team to be expected to take time out of working on the 2000 issue tickets on github to write documentation on how to use GitHub, or use MeteorJS on a basic level, because that already exists out there.

Before I started playing with Rocket.Chat I had never written a line of JavaScript in my life, Never used MongoDB and had never even seen MeteorJS - And Here I am 1 year later with a Custom RocketChat deployment approaching nearly 40,000 lines of custom code for my particular use case.

Another good way of figuring this stuff out is to just search all over github for RocketChat. As in look at what other people are doing in their own repos/what stuff they are contributing by searching across all repos like this: https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=RocketChat&type=

That right now brings up 341 repository results of people who have developed their own tools/plugins/whatever for RocketChat and you'll get a better idea of how it all works.

Anyways. I'll stop now.

Good luck on your journey mate.

MrBunBuns commented 7 years ago

I've made some changes to the Rocket.Chat.Docs/1. Contributing/Developing/README.md within the Achaikos branch. I added a tutorial for how to get it up and running on linux machines. If anyone could take a look and provide feedback that would be great. Also I want to add a section for windows as well, however I cant get meteor to work in gitbash.

vfseanm commented 7 years ago

@jszaszvari and anyone else from Rocket Chat - apologies if I stressed anyone out with this issue. I definitely didn't mean anything I suggested as a criticism! What you folks are doing is awesome and it's amazing how much you've documented already.

I thought a handholding guide that helped a novice engineer make a trivial change would help the breadth of those who could contribute to the project. @jszaszvari, you're right, most of those steps are documented already elsewhere (e.g. by github and meteor) and it could be basically just links to other tutorials, followed by like the name of a file where you can make a visible change. Like "Hey, you're new? Okay, you're gonna want to learn Meteor JS, here's the link to that. Also Mongo DB, here's that link. Also if you don't know how to use github here's that link. Great, now clone the repo and here's a filename where you can make a visible change." Calling out example-build-run.sh as a reference would be helpful too.

Or not, this is obviously crazy low priority. Feel free to close this issue.

vchrombie commented 7 years ago

I am also interested to work on this.

pixidust724 commented 7 years ago

How do get involved in this?

MrBunBuns commented 7 years ago

I have made improvements to the developing guide for Rocket.Chat.Docs that have improved the guide for how to start development. Also your issues aren't related Rocket.Chat but developing as a whole. As a result I would recommend close this as it isn't really an issue.

geekgonecrazy commented 6 years ago

We've made a lot of improvements to our docs. Others have also contributed changes to our getting started guide for developers. https://rocket.chat/docs/developer-guides/quick-start/

Please feel free to add improvements: https://github.com/RocketChat/docs

Going to go ahead and close. Feel free to open issues about specific things on our docs repo that you'd like to see documents for, or even contribute them.

Thanks,