Contributing ↑

RSpec is a community-driven project that has benefited from improvements from over 500 contributors. We welcome contributions from everyone. While contributing, please follow the project code of conduct, so that everyone can be included.

If you’d like to help make RSpec better, here are some ways you can contribute:

If you need help getting started, check out the DEVELOPMENT file for steps that will get you up and running.

Thanks for helping us make RSpec better!

Small issues ↑

These issue are ones that we be believe are best suited for new contributors to get started with. They represent a meaningful contribution to the project that should not be too hard to pull off.

Report template ↑

Having a way to reproduce your issue will be very helpful for others to help confirm, investigate and ultimately fix your issue. You can do this by providing an executable test case. To make this process easier, we have prepared one basic bug report templates for you to use as a starting point.

Maintenance branches ↑

Maintenance branches are how we manage the different supported point releases of RSpec. As such, while they might look like good candidates to merge into main, please do not open pull requests to merge them.

Working on multiple RSpec repositories at the same time ↑

RSpec is composed of multiple gems (rspec-core, rspec-mocks, etc). There are the core gems which live in the monorepo, but sometimes the external gems, e.g. rspec-rails, will require cross repository changes.

When submitting your code for review, we ask that you get a passing build (green CI). If you are working across the repositories, it is recommended to get your PR to the monorepo completed first, but you can also temporarily add a commit that pins your PR to the right branch of the other repository you depend on. For example, if we wanted a change in rspec-rails that relied on a change in rspec-mocks. We add a commit with the title:

[WIP] Use rspec-mocks with “custom-failure-message” branch

And content:

%w[rspec rspec-core rspec-expectations rspec-support].each do |lib|
  if lib == 'rspec'
    gem lib, git: "https://github.com/rspec/rspec"
  else
    gem lib, git: "https://github.com/rspec/rspec", glob: "#{lib}/#{lib}.gemspec"
  end
end
gem 'rspec-mocks', git: "https://github.com/my_user_name/rspec", branch: 'your-custom-branch', glob: "rspec-mocks/rspec-mocks.gemspec"

In general the process is: 1. Create PRs explaining what you are trying to achieve. 2. Pin the external repository to the monorepo. 3. Check they pass (go green). 4. Await review if appropriate. 5. Await the merging of the core PR. 6. Remove the commit from step 2. 7. Await the merging of the extension PR.