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Maintaining Shoulda Matchers

As maintainers of the gem, this is our guide. Most of the steps and guidelines in the Contributing document apply here, including how to set up your environment, write code to fit the code style, run tests, craft commits and manage branches. Beyond this, this document provides some details that would be too low-level for contributors.

Communication

We use a combination of methods to communicate with each other:

  • In planning major releases, it can be helpful to create a new issue outlining the changes as well as steps needed to launch the release. This serves both as an announcement to the community as well as an area to keep a checklist.
  • To track progress for the next release, GitHub milestones are useful.
  • To track progress on the movement of issues, labels are useful.
  • To communicate small-scale changes, pull requests are effective, as mentioned above.
  • To communicate large-scale changes or explain topics, email is best.

Managing the community

As anyone who has played a sim game before, it's important to make your patrons happy. We do this by:

  • Answering questions from members of the community
  • Closing stale issues and feature requests
  • Keeping the community informed by ensuring that the changelog is up to date
  • Ensuring that the inline documentation, as well as the docsite, is kept up to date

Workflow

We generally follow GitHub Flow. The master branch is the main line, and all branches are cut from and get merged back into this branch. Generally, the workflow is as follows:

  • Cut a feature or bugfix branch from this branch.
  • Upon completing a branch, create a PR and ask another maintainer to approve it.
  • Try to keep the commit history as clean as possible. Before merging, squash "WIP" or related commits together and rebase as needed.
  • Once your PR is approved and you've cleaned up your branch, you're free to merge it in.

Architecture

Besides the matchers, there are files in lib which you may need to reference or update:

  • lib/shoulda/matchers/doublespeak* -- a small handrolled mocking library which is used by the permit matcher
  • lib/shoulda/matchers/util* -- extra methods which are used in various places to detect library versions, wrap/indent text, and more

Updating the changelog

After every user-facing change makes it into master, we make a note of it in the changelog, which for historical reasons is kept in NEWS.md. The changelog is sorted in reverse order by release version, with the topmost version as the next release (tagged as "(Unreleased)").

Within each version, there are five available categories you can divide changes into. They are all optional but they should appear in this order:

  1. Backward-compatible changes
  2. Deprecations
  3. Bug fixes
  4. Features
  5. Improvements

Within each category section, the changes relevant to that category are listed in chronological order.

For each change, provide a human-readable description of the change as well as a linked reference to the PR where that change emerged (or the commit ID if no such PR is available). This helps users cross-reference changes if they need to.

Documentation

Generating documentation

As mentioned in the Contributing document, we use YARD for documentation. YARD is configured via .yardopts to process the Ruby files in lib/ as well as NEWS.md and the Markdown files in docs/ and write the documentation in HTML form to doc. This command will do exactly that:

bundle exec yard doc

However, if you're actively updating the documentation, it's more helpful to launch a process that will watch the aforementioned source files for changes and generate the HTML for you automatically:

bundle exec rake docs:autogenerate

Whichever approach you take, you can view the generated docs locally by running:

open doc/index.html

About the docsite

The docfiles that YARD generates are published to the docsite, which is located at:

https://matchers.shoulda.io/docs

The docsite is hosted on GitHub Pages*. As such, the gh-pages branch hosts the code for the docsite. This branch is written to automatically by the docs:publish and docs:publish_latest tasks.

The URL above actually links to a bare-bones HTML page which merely serves to automatically redirect the visitor to the docs for the latest published version of the gem. This version is hardcoded in the HTML page, but is also updated automatically by the docs:publish and docs:publish_latest tasks.

* thoughtbot owns https://shoulda.io, and they've got matchers.shoulda.io set up on the DNS level as an alias for thoughtbot.github.io/shoulda-matchers.

Versioning

Naming a new version

As designated in the README, we follow SemVer 2.0. This offers a meaningful baseline for deciding how to name versions. Generally speaking:

  • We bump the "major" part of the version if we're introducing backward-incompatible changes (e.g. changing the API or core behavior, removing parts of the API, or dropping support for a version of Ruby).
  • We bump the "minor" part if we're adding a new feature (e.g. adding a new matcher or adding a new qualifier to a matcher).
  • We bump the "patch" part if we're merely including bugfixes.

In addition to major, minor, and patch levels, you can also append a suffix to the version for pre-release versions. We usually use this to issue release candidates prior to an actual release. A version number in this case might look like 4.0.0.rc1.

Releasing a new version

Releasing a new version is very simple:

  1. First, you'll want to be given ownership permissions for the Ruby gem itself. If you want to give someone else these rights, you can use:

    gem owner shoulda-matchers -a <email address>

  2. Next, you'll want to update the VERSION constant in lib/shoulda/matchers/version.rb. This constant is referenced in the gemspec and is used in the Rake tasks to publish the gem on RubyGems as well as generate documentation.

  3. Finally, you'll want to run:

    rake release

    This will not only push the gem to RubyGems, but also update the docsite.

Re-publishing docs

In general you'll use the release task to update the docsite, but there may be a situation where you'll need to do it manually.

You can re-publish the docs for the latest version (as governed by lib/shoulda/matchers/version.rb) by running:

bundle exec rake docs:publish_latest

This will update the version to which the docsite auto-redirects to the latest version. For instance, if the latest version were 4.0.0, this command would publish the docs at https://matchers.shoulda.io/docs/v4.0.0 but redirect https://matchers.shoulda.io/docs to this location.

However, if you want to publish the docs for a version and at the same time manually set the auto-redirected version, you can run this instead:

bundle exec rake docs:publish[version, latest_version]

Here, version and latest_version are both version strings. For instance, you might say:

bundle exec rake docs:publish[4.0.0, 3.7.2]

This would publish the docs for 4.0.0 at https://matchers.shoulda.io/docs/v4.0.0, but redirect https://matchers.shoulda.io/docs to https://matchers.shoulda.io/docs/v3.7.2.

Addendum: Labels

In order to corral the issue and PR backlog, we've found labels to be useful for cataloguing and tracking progress purposes. Over time we've added quite a collection of labels. Here's a quick list:

Labels for issues

  • Issue: Bug
  • Issue: Feature Request
  • Issue: Need to Investigate -- if we don't know whether a bug is legitimate or not
  • Issue: PR Needed -- perhaps unnecessary, but it does signal to the community that we'd love a PR

Labels for PRs

  • PR: Bugfix
  • PR: Feature
  • PR: Good to Merge -- most of the time not necessary, but can be helpful in a code freeze before a release to mark PRs that we will include in the next release
  • PR: In Progress -- used to mark PRs that are still being worked on by the PR author
  • PR: Needs Documentation
  • PR: Needs Review
  • PR: Needs Tests
  • PR: Needs Updates Before Merge -- along the same lines as the other "Needs" tags, but more generic

Generic labels

  • Blocked
  • Documentation
  • Needs Decision
  • Needs Revisiting
  • Question
  • Rails X
  • Ruby X.Y
  • UX