Want to contribute? Great! First, read this page.
- Before You Contribute
- Large Language Models
- Development Dependencies
- Writing Code
- Release Process
- Package Structure
Before we can use your code, you must sign the Google Individual Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which you can do online. The CLA is necessary mainly because you own the copyright to your changes, even after your contribution becomes part of our codebase, so we need your permission to use and distribute your code. We also need to be sure of various other things—for instance that you'll tell us if you know that your code infringes on other people's patents. You don't have to sign the CLA until after you've submitted your code for review and a member has approved it, but you must do it before we can put your code into our codebase.
Before you start working on a larger contribution, you should get in touch with us first through the issue tracker with your idea so that we can help out and possibly guide you. Coordinating up front makes it much easier to avoid frustration later on.
Contributions made by corporations are covered by a different agreement than the one above, the Software Grant and Corporate Contributor License Agreement.
Do not submit any code or prose written or modified by large language models or "artificial intelligence" such as GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT to this project. These tools produce code that looks plausible, which means that not only is it likely to contain bugs those bugs are likely to be difficult to notice on review. In addition, because these models were trained indiscriminately and non-consensually on open-source code with a variety of licenses, it's not obvious that we have the moral or legal right to redistribute code they generate.
-
Install the Dart SDK. If you download an archive manually rather than using an installer, make sure the SDK's
bin
directory is on yourPATH
. -
In this repository, run
dart pub get
. This will install all of the Dart dependencies. -
Install Node.js. This is only necessary if you're making changes to the language or to Dart Sass's Node API.
Dart Sass follows the standard Dart style guide wherever possible, including using the Dart formatter on all code. We also try to have no Dart analyzer warnings or hints, although if one sneaks in for a few revisions that's not a big deal.
Before you send a pull request, we recommend you run the following steps:
-
dart run grinder
will reformat your code using the Dart formatter to make sure it's nice and neat, and run the synchronizer on asynchronous files. -
dart analyze lib test
will run Dart's static analyzer to ensure that there aren't any obvious bugs in your code. If you're using a Dart-enabled IDE, you can also just check that there aren't any warnings in there. -
dart run test -x node
will run the tests for the Dart VM API. These are a good sanity check, but they aren't comprehensive; GitHub Actions will also run Node.js API tests and Sass language tests, all of which must pass before your pull request is merged. See Changing the Language and Changing the Node API for more details.
If you're making a change to the Sass language, either to fix a bug or add a feature, you'll need to write tests in the sass-spec repository. This repository contains language tests that are shared among the main Sass implementations. Any new feature should be thoroughly tested there, and any bug should have a regression test added.
To create a new spec:
-
Install Node.js v14.14 or newer.
-
# Replace $USER with your GitHub username. git clone https://github.com/$USER/sass-spec cd sass-spec npm install
-
For each test case you want to add:
-
Create a directory within
sass-spec/spec/
for your test. Don't worry too much about finding exactly the right place, we'll sort that out during code review. -
Following the spec style guide, create an
hrx
file that exercises your language change, verifying that the change produces expected output/errors.
-
-
If you're adding a new language feature, it probably won't be supported by LibSass yet. You can indicate this and keep tests passing by adding an
options.yml
file like this to the directory containing your tests:--- :ignore_for: - libsass
If you're fixing a bug, you'll only need to do this if the bug also appears in other Sass implementations.
-
Make sure all the language tests, including the new ones, are passing by running this within
sass-spec/
:# Replace .. with the path to dart-sass if it's not the parent directory. npm run sass-spec -- --dart ..
-
You can also run specs within a single directory:
npm run sass-spec --dart .. spec/my/new/feature
-
If you pass the
--interactive
flag, the spec runner will stop each time a spec fails and ask you what to do about the failure.
-
-
Once you've added specs and they're passing for Dart Sass, create a pull request for sass-spec with
[skip dart-sass]
at the end of the message. This tells sass-spec not to run tests against the old version of Dart Sass, since it doesn't have your changes yet. -
Finally, create a pull request for Dart Sass with a link to the sass-spec pull request at the end of the message. This tells Dart Sass to test against your new sass-spec tests.
Most of Dart Sass's code is shared between Dart and Node.js, but the API that's
exported by the sass
npm package is Node-specific. It's defined using
Dart's JS interop package, and it's tested by compiling the Dart package to
JS and loading that JS using JS interop to best simulate the conditions under
which it will be used in the real world.
The tests for the Node API live in test/node_api
. Before running them, and any
time you make a change to Dart Sass, run dart run grinder before-test
to
compile the Dart code to JavaScript (note that you don't need to recompile if
you've only changed the test code). To run Node tests, just run
dart run test -t node
.
Dart Sass supports two modes of operation: synchronous (compile()
and
compileString()
), which requires all importers and custom functions to be
synchronous themselves, and asynchronous (compileAsync()
and
compileStringAsync()
), which allows importers and custom functions to be
asynchronous. These modes use essentially identical logic, but because Dart
represents synchronous and asynchronous computations in fundamentally different
ways they can't share code.
To avoid colossal amounts of duplicated code, we have a few files that are
written in an asynchronous style originally and then compiled to their
synchronous equivalents using dart run grinder synchronize
. In particular:
lib/src/visitor/async_evaluate.dart
is compiled tolib/src/visitor/evaluate.dart
.lib/src/async_environment.dart
is compiled tolib/src/environment.dart
.
When contributing code to these files, you should make manual changes only to
the asynchronous versions and run dart run grinder
to compile them to their
synchronous equivalents.
Note that the lib/src/callable/async_built_in.dart
and
lib/src/callable/built_in.dart
files are not automatically synchronized;
they're so small and would require so many special cases that they're not worth
automating.
All files in the project must start with the following header.
// Copyright 2021 Google LLC. Use of this source code is governed by an
// MIT-style license that can be found in the LICENSE file or at
// https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT.
Most of the release process is fully automated on GitHub actions, triggered by
pushing a tag matching the current pubspec.yaml
version. However, there are a
few things to do before pushing that tag:
-
Make sure the
pubspec.yaml
version doesn't end in-dev
. (This is a Dart convention to distinguish commits that aren't meant for release from commits that are.) -
Make sure that
CHANGELOG.md
has an entry for the current version. -
Make sure that any packages in
pkg
depend on the current version ofsass
. -
Increment the versions of all packages in
pkg
. These should be incremented at least as much as thesass
version, and more if you add a new API that's exposed by one of those packages. -
Make sure that every package in
pkg
'sCHANGELOG.md
has an entry for its current version.
You don't need to create tags for packages in pkg
; that will be handled
automatically by GitHub actions.
The structure of the Sass package is documented in README.md files in most
directories under lib/
. This documentation is intended to help contributors
quickly build a basic understanding of the structure of the compiler and how its
various pieces fit together. lib/src/README.md
is a good starting point to get
an overview of the compiler as a whole.