balena-cli/CONTRIBUTING.md

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# Contributing
The balena CLI is an open source project and your contribution is welcome!
After cloning this repository and running `npm install`, the CLI can be built with `npm run build`
and executed with `./bin/run`. In order to ease development:
* `npm run build:fast` skips some of the build steps for interactive testing, or
* `./bin/balena-dev` uses `ts-node/register` and `coffeescript/register` to transpile on the fly.
Before opening a PR, please be sure to test your changes with `npm test`.
## Semantic versioning and commit messages
The CLI version numbering adheres to [Semantic Versioning](http://semver.org/). The following
header/row is required in the body of a commit message, and will cause the CI build to fail if absent:
```
Change-type: patch|minor|major
```
Version numbers and commit messages are automatically added to the `CHANGELOG.md` file by the CI
build flow, after a pull request is merged. It should not be manually edited.
## Editing documentation files (CHANGELOG, README, website...)
The `doc/cli.markdown` file is automatically generated by running `npm run build:doc` (which also
runs as part of `npm run build`). That file is then pulled by scripts in the
[balena-io/docs](https://github.com/balena-io/docs/) GitHub repo for publishing at the [CLI
Documentation page](https://www.balena.io/docs/reference/cli/).
The content sources for the auto generation of `doc/cli.markdown` are:
* Selected sections of the README file.
* The CLI's command documentation in source code (both Capitano and oclif commands), for example:
* `lib/actions/build.coffee`
* `lib/actions-oclif/env/add.ts`
The README file is manually edited, but subsections are automatically extracted for inclusion in
`doc/cli.markdown` by the `getCapitanoDoc()` function in
[`automation/capitanodoc/capitanodoc.ts`](https://github.com/balena-io/balena-cli/blob/master/automation/capitanodoc/capitanodoc.ts).
The `INSTALL.md` and `TROUBLESHOOTING.md` files are also manually edited.
## Windows
Please note that `npm run build:installer` (which generates the `.exe` executable installer on
Windows) requires [MSYS2](https://www.msys2.org/) to be installed. Other than that, the standard
Command Prompt or PowerShell can be used.
## TypeScript vs CoffeeScript, and Capitano vs oclif
The CLI was originally written in [CoffeeScript](https://coffeescript.org), but we decided to
migrate to [TypeScript](https://www.typescriptlang.org/) in order to take advantage of static
typing and formal programming interfaces. The migration is taking place gradually, as part of
maintenance work or the implementation of new features.
Similarly, [Capitano](https://github.com/balena-io/capitano) was originally adopted as the CLI's
framework, but we recently decided to take advantage of [oclif](https://oclif.io/)'s features such
as native installers for Windows, macOS and Linux, and support for custom flag parsing (for
example, we're still battling with Capitano's behavior of dropping leading zeros of arguments that
look like integers such as some abbreviated UUIDs, and migrating to oclif is a solution). Again the
migration is taking place gradually, with some CLI commands parsed by oclif and others by Capitano
(a simple command line pre-parsing takes place in `app.ts` to decide whether to route full parsing
to Capitano or oclif).