How to contribute

Contributing #

This project is immense, and not everytime the working staff can work on it. It’s a project born for the students by the students, so every possible help is appreciated. Do you feel like helping out? Just follow this guide in order to know how you can contribute!

Contributing can be done via GitHub, so you might want to know a bit of the basics of it (mainly what’s Git, how to fork and clone a repo, what are commits and pull requests). If you don’t feel like doing it from the CLI (Command Line Interface), you can do it via VSCode or any editor that you may prefer. Here, we’ll tell you how to do it via a CLI, so that at the end you’ll also have some take-home knowledge of how Git works.

Pull Request’s Rules & Help Contributing

You can find more info about how to do a correct pull request here

If you’re not familiar with git and GitHub, you can follow GitHub’s guide on how to contribute to other’s projects, or eventually ask help to the project’s staff or in one of the available groups.

Clone the project #

In order to contribute to the development of the site, you must create a fork of the project and edit it. Once you make your edit, you can open a pull request and send your edits to us. Let’s see how to do this:

  1. On GitHub, open the repository page of the site and create a fork via the button on the top right. You can call it however you want, it won’t impact the original repo;
  2. Once your fork finished being created, you have to clone it locally. Before actually cloning it, you must copy the address of the repository: on the page of the fork that you just created, click on the green “ Code” button that you can find on the top of the page, and copy the https URL that should end in .git from the newly opened pop-up;
  3. Open a terminal and navigate on a folder where you want to clone the fork. Once you decided a folder, type git clone --recurse-submodules and then paste your URL after the command. You’ll see something like:
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/<your_username>/<fork_name>.git

Now you cloned the fork locally, meaning that by opening up a text editor you can start editing the files of the site

Start the site locally #

There are two ways to run the site locally. One is by using the Hugo binaries, the other is by using Docker. Although they provide the same functions, Docker might be a hard tool if you’re using it for the first time. We encourage you to try it, but if you don’t feel like it you can just use the Hugo binary:

Using Hugo #

Before starting, check if you have the Hugo binaries installed.

  1. While still being on the folder of the repo, you can run locally the site by doing
hugo server

Warning

If you received an error like the following

Error: error building site: process: readAndProcessContent: "/home/<user>
/SapienzaStudentsNetworkFork/it/canali/discord.md:7:1": failed to extract
shortcode: template for shortcode "button" not found

then it means that the theme of the site wasn’t cloned succesfully. In order to fix this, you have two ways:

  1. Remove from Git the folder of the theme with
git rm themes/hugo-book
  1. Remove the folder of the theme. On UNIX-like systems, it would be
rm -rf themes/hugo-book
  1. Install the theme again with Git, by using the following command:
git submodule add https://github.com/alex-shpak/hugo-book themes/hugo-book

Now the problem should have disappeared, and you should be able to build without problems the site.

  1. Open localhost:1313 on your browser and there you go! You can now live preview the site. Since Hugo supports hot reloading, everytime a file changes, the site will too.

  2. If you want to stop the server, just press Ctrl + C in the terminal.

Using Docker #

Before starting, check if you have Docker installed.

  1. In order to run the site locally and test your code, run the following commands:
docker build -t hugo-site . # Just the first time that you clone the fork
sudo docker run --rm -p 1313:1313 -v $(pwd):/app hugo-site # Everytime that you work on the project
  1. Open localhost:1313 in the browser, and there you go! You can now preview the site.
  2. If you want to stop the server, just press Ctrl+C in the terminal.

Proposals / Bugs #

If you have any suggestions for making the site better, or you want to signal a bug, you can open an issue on the GitHub repository (NOT on your fork!). Thank you in advance for any help you may give us!

11 September 2024 | matypist