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Contributing code

Before contributing code, please familiarise yourself with the Project conventions.

General advice

  • Submit pull-requests sooner rather than later: CI feedback is your friend, not your enemy.
  • Mark in-progress PRs as drafts until they are ready for review.
  • Don't be afraid to show your working. We're all learning. If you need help, linking to code changes in a PR is a quick and easy way to explain the problem.
  • Where possible, a feature branch should be kept up-to-date with main by regularly merging main into the feature branch. This will help to prevent conflicts when merging the feature branch back into main, and ensure there are no inconsistencies.

Submitting a pull request (PR)

  1. Push your branch to the remote.
  2. Head to https://github.com/nationalarchives/ds-search/pulls and create a pull request from your branch.

For the PR Title:

  • For ticketed features or ticketed bugs, use the naming convention: FIND-XXX: Short description
  • For housekeeping tasks or other unticketed work, use the convention: CHORE: Short description

See here for more information on naming conventions.

  1. To mark a PR as a draft, click the drop-down where it says "Create pull request" and select the "Create draft pull request" button instead.
  2. When you are finished (and CI is passing): Add a useful description, mark the PR as "Ready to review", and request a review from another developer.

Merging a branch ?

Please see here for guidance on merging branches.