Contribution Guide

Any contribution to Nuxt.js is more than welcome!

Reporting Issues

A great way to contribute to the project is to send a detailed report when you encounter an issue. To make things easier for contributors and maintainers, we use CMTY.

Please make sure to include a reproduction repository or CodeSandBox so that bugs can be reproduced without great efforts. The better a bug can be reproduced, the faster we can start fixing it!

Pull Requests

We’d love to see your pull requests, even if it’s just to fix a typo!

However, any significant improvement should be associated to an existing feature request or bug report.

Getting started

1. Fork the Nuxt repository to your own GitHub account and then clone it to your local device.
2. Run npm install or yarn install to install the dependencies.

Note that both npm and yarn have been seen to miss installing dependencies. To remedy that, you can either delete the node_modules folder in your example app and install again or do a local install of the missing dependencies.

If you are adding a dependency, please use yarn add. The yarn.lock file is the source of truth for all Nuxt dependencies.

Setup

Before running any tests, make sure all dependencies are met and build all packages:

yarn
yarn build

Test structure

A great PR, whether it includes a bug fix or a new feature, will often include tests. To write great tests, let us explain our test structure:

Fixtures

The fixtures (found under tests/fixtures) contain several Nuxt applications. To keep build time as short as possible, we don’t build an own Nuxt application per test. Instead, the fixtures are built (yarn test:fixtures) before running the actual unit tests.

Please make sure to alter or add a new fixture when submitting a PR to reflect the changes properly (if applicable).

Also, don’t forget to rebuild a fixture after changing it by running the corresponding test with jest test/fixtures/my-fixture/my-fixture.test.js!

Unit tests

The unit tests can be found in tests/unit and will be executed after building the fixtures. A fresh Nuxt server will be used per test so that no shared state (except the initial state from the build step) is present.

After adding your unit tests, you can run them directly:

jest test/unit/test.js

Or you can run the whole unit test suite:

yarn test:unit

Again, please be aware that you might have to rebuild your fixtures before!

Testing your changes

While working on your PR you will likely want to check if your fixture is set up correctly or debug your current changes.

To do so you can use the Nuxt script itself to launch for example your fixture or an example app:

yarn nuxt examples/your-app
yarn nuxt test/fixtures/your-fixture-app

npm link could also (and does, to some extent) work for this, but it has been known to exhibit some issues. That is why we recommend calling yarn nuxt directly to run examples.

Examples

If you are working on a larger feature, please set up an example app in examples/. This will help greatly in understanding changes and also help Nuxt users to understand the feature you’ve built in-depth.

Linting

As you might have noticed already, we are using ESLint to enforce a code standard. Please run yarn lint before committing your changes to verify that the code style is correct. If not, you can use yarn lint --fix or npm run lint -- --fix (no typo!) to fix most of the style changes. If there are still errors left, you must correct them manually.

Documentation

If you are adding a new feature, or refactoring or changing the behavior of Nuxt in any other manner, you’ll likely want to document the changes. Please do so with a PR to the docs repository. You don’t have to write documentation up immediately (but please do so as soon as your pull request is mature enough).

Final checklist

When submitting your PR, there is a simple template that you have to fill out. Please tick all appropriate “answers” in the checklists.

Troubleshooting

Debugging tests on macOS

Searching for getPort() will reveal it’s used to start new Nuxt processes during tests. It’s been seen to stop working on macOS at times and may require you to manually set a port for testing.

Another common issue is Nuxt processes that may hang in memory when running fixture tests. A ghost process will often prevent subsequent tests from working. Run ps aux | grep -i node to inspect any hanging test processes if you suspect this is happening.