CONTRIBUTING.markdown

#Guidelines for Contributing to Pivotal Core Kit (PCK)

So, you want to add a new feature to PivotalCoreKit … great! Before you can start contributing to PCK, you'll need to do some one-time set up to do PCK development on your local machine.

##Checklist before submitting a pull request

Ensure that you have:

• Created your feature on a local branch
• Placed your feature in the correct PCK module
• Written good tests for your feature
• Run all of PCK's tests to confirm that no existing features have regressed
• Added your feature to the CHANGES file

An example feature

Let's say we are developing a category for NSString instances that returns a new string transformed into Pig Latin. If we used this category in our production code like this:

NSString *originalString = @"connecticut is great";
NSString *pigLatinString = [@"connecticut is great" asPigLatin];

NSLog(@"original string: '%@'", originalString);
NSLog(@"pig latin string: '%@'", pigLatinString);

we would expect console output like this:

> original string: 'connecticut is great'
> pig latin string: 'onnecticutcay isway eatgray'

Now that we have defined our feature, we can begin adding it to PCK.

##Create a feature branch

Start by creating a new local branch for the feature.

In our Pig Latin example, we would start by creating a new feature branch like this:

git checkout -b add-pig-latin-category-to-nsstring

##Determine where your feature should live in Pivotal Core Kit

PCK is actually a collection of several different Xcode projects which extend Apple frameworks (like Foundation, UIKit, CoreLocation, etc). Each Xcode project lives inside a folder with the same name as the Apple framework it extends. For more information about PCK's organization, refer to the project README.

In our Pig Latin example above, we are writing a category on NSString, which is declared in Apple's Foundation framework. Since our category is meant to be used in production code we would want to put this feature in Foundation+PivotalCore.

So we would declare the public methods for our feature in:

Foundation/Core/Extensions/NSString+PivotalCore.h

We would add the production implementation of our feature in:

Foundation/Core/Extensions/NSString+PivotalCore.m

And we would add tests for our feature to:

Foundation/Spec/Extensions/NSStringSpec+PivotalCore.mm

##Writing tests for a PCK feature

PCK tests are written using Cedar, an open source BDD testing framework for Objective-C developed at Pivotal Labs. You can find out more about writing cedar tests on the cedar wiki.

A good cedar test for our Pig Latin feature might start like this:

describe(@"turning a string into Pig Latin", ^{

  it(@"should transform words beginning with one consonant", ^{
      [@"connecticut" asPigLatin] should equal(@"onnecticutcay");
  });

  it(@"should transform words beginning with a vowel", ^{
      [@"ohio" asPigLatin] should equal(@"ohioway");
  });

  it(@"should transform words beginning with two consonants", ^{
      [@"great" asPigLatin] should equal(@"eatgray");
  });

  // etc.
};

##Running all PCK tests

Before submitting your pull request, you should run all of PCK's tests to make sure your feature hasn't broken anything. To run all the PCK specs, simply navigate to the PCK project root and run the following rake command from the terminal:

rake all:spec

##Editing the CHANGES file Along with the code for your feature, you should also edit the CHANGES file to note the changes you have made. This should be a succinct summary of your feature under the section for the version labeled "in progress". Refer to the CHANGES file itself for examples.

##One time setup for PCK development Let's get started making a fork of the PivotalCoreKit repository in your own github account and cloning it to your development machine.

Before getting started, you might want to run the tests to ensure your local copy of PCK is working and your development environment is set up correctly. You can run all of PCK's tests by running the following commands from the project root:

git submodule update --init
rake all:spec

Assuming that all the specs ran and passed, we're ready to begin developing your new feature.

Making a release (for PCK maintainers only)

After stories before a release marker in the backlog have been accepted by the PM and the next task in tracker is a release marker, it's time to create a release.

Here's the brief checklist for creating a new release version of PivotalCoreKit.

• Update CHANGES.markdown to include major new features, bug fixes, and API changes.

• Update PivotalCoreKit.podspec to advance the version number for the pod and the git tag it points to on github.

• When you've made those commits and are ready to tag, tag the project thusly: git tag -a vx.x.x -m 'Refer to CHANGES.markdown for a list of changes in this release'

• git push origin head

• git push origin --tags

• pod spec lint to ensure that there is no problem with the podspec. If there are problems, you'll need to delete the tag from origin, fix the issue, and try again.

• Make a release in github that points to the tag

• pod trunk push to send the new version to cocoapods