Friction for (new) contributors

[gr2m]

Hello friends,

I'd like to lower the barrier to (new) contributors.

Can you share what caused friction when you contributed to snowpack in the past. Please add one comment per friction, so we can discuss and follow up separately.

Pinging recent contributors I've seen around in the past week (thank you 💐). I'd appreciate if you could share any friction you run into, or if you have any ideas how contributing could be made easier for you and others in future. @brodybits @chenxsan @HTMLGhozt @HTMLGhozt @ironhee @jaredLunde @MoonBall @silverwind @stramel

[gr2m]

No way to run a single build or install test

[FredKSchott]

You can! with yarn test -t SPECIAL_STRING

example: yarn test -t treeshake

[FredKSchott]

(note: lots of "obsolete" output to scroll up through when you do this, is there some way to get rid of this? or, tell users that "obsolete snapshots" is acceptable in this case)

another idea:

yarn test:regex treeshake

"test:regex": "yarn test -t"

[melissamcewen]

Can you give some examples for this? Like if I only want to run install tests would yarn test -t install work?

[gr2m]

We don't have good testing for third party plugins at the moment, hmm
— @FredKSchott (#950)

[gr2m]

Jovi just shared his tests for the prefresh plugin, which involve spinning up a dev server and running puppeteer against it. Could be useful for us as we start testing the dev server: https://github.com/JoviDeCroock/prefresh/blob/main/test/index.test.js

— @FredKSchott (link)

[gr2m]

Resolved by #979

Instructions from CONTRIBUTING.md to run snowpack locally by path do not work

# Run snowpack locally by path, in some sibling project
cd ../some-other-project && ../pkg/dist-node/index.bin.js
# Or, link the built package to run anywhere via global CLI
cd pkg && npm link
snowpack

[gr2m]

Hard to confirm if a pull request fixes a user's problem. I'd love to just npm install github.pika.dev/pikapkg/snowpack/pull/950 for local testing ;)

[FredKSchott]

We should talk through a special snowpack setup here. Rough idea:

1. in Github Action, run build
2. npm pack pkg directory
3. upload tarball to an S3 bucket
4. post a comment to the PR, telling you where you can npm install ${TARBALL_URL}

[FredKSchott]

(Or, just re-connect Pika CI :D)

[MoonBall]

resolved via #979

how to run only one test when a test snapshot failed to be matched?

[silverwind]

The fact that yarn && yarn test on a fresh checkout does not pass (I had to spy into test.yml to find out what to do).

[silverwind]

Can't say I'm a fan of git hooks. Why not build on demand when source files are newer than output files? You could use make for that 😉 (much more powerful than npm scripts and will work with Deno).

[FredKSchott]

Agreed! I meant:

// top-level package.json
"scripts": {
  "prepare": "yarn build"
}

Both npm and yarn would run this automatically after every install.

[silverwind]

npm postinstall hook is probably the right place but ultimately it's a flawed approach because if I reinstall dependencies with already up-to-date build files it would still perform a unneeded build. Still better than the current situation thought.

[FredKSchott]

(note: I think the second yarn --ignore-engines --force in the CI script is not necessary, but not sure. The idea is that yarn install will take the built "pkg" version of snowpack, and link it into the top level node_modules dir. But, we don't check that in, it comes from the build. And, we can't build, until we've installed dependencies. So, it doesn't exist to be linked when you run that first install. Dang, maybe it is required after all).

[FredKSchott]

What I think could work:

"prepare": "yarn build && yarn install --no-scripts" // or, is there some way to relink without running a full install?

[gr2m]

Work in progress: #1019

Most internal plugins are lacking tests. @Akimyou added great tests to plugins/plugin-vue in #984. It would be great to add similar tests to the remaining plugins, so contributors of new internal plugins could use them as a starting point

[Akimyou]

How about the test coverage collection? Need U suggest about how we to do it.

[gr2m]

I agree that tracking coverage would be great! With the plugins it should be fairly simple, with the build tests it might be hard as we spawn a child process. But I think it's possible, too, I just never needed it so far

[gr2m]

As a user, it is currently quite hard to debug a problem if something is not working correctly. From my experience debugging #1016:

1. When testing with my local snowpack repository, I could sometimes reproduce the problem and sometimes I couldn't. Turned out that the problem didn't occur if a previous run created a cache in node_modules/.cache/snowpack/dev.
2. It was hard to identify the place in the code where snowpack dev got stuck.

To address this friction, I would recommend we

1. Document the --verbose and --reload flags in CONTRIBUTING.md
2. Add many more logger.debug statements across the source code. @drwpow already added a few as part of Fix dev server hanging on binary files #1017. I think this would be a great opportunity to walk through the entire code base and add more logger.debug statements to express what the respective parts are doing

[gr2m]

• --verbose and --reload flags have been addressed in docs(CONTRIBUTING): --verbose and --reload CLI flags #1055

[Akimyou]

As an developer in dev state. I prefer can run ts source code directly rather than have to build it. Thanks to ts-node project, we can do it.

Please consider we can use ts-node run snowpack ts source directly in dev state and we can run ci testing and publish pre build nodejs bin as original. It will enhance our dev speed and experience.

The way to use ts-node please see this closed PR for example: #704

[Paosder]

It would be great if ts-node can improve debugging with typescript which current version of snowpack doesn't.

[Akimyou]

Please try this demo: https://github.com/Akimyou/snowpack/tree/custom/snowpack

yarn && yarn build
cd snowpack/snowpack
npm link

then try snowpack-ts --help

For debugging, may be need config vscode debugger. I will try it latter.

[Akimyou]

Thanks for new dev tools in snowpack pkgs: https://github.com/pikapkg/snowpack/blob/master/snowpack/package.json
Current dev experience is comfortable, include ts-node is useless.

[chphillipvose]

Hi, I've tried following the contributions guide to submit a PR for an issue (#3398) but I can't seem to push my branch as per the instructions (permissions issue). What's the best way to go about sorting out access?

[drwpow]

@chphillipvose you’ll want to submit a PR from your fork, as outlined in the GitHub docs here. Let me know if you have any questions about the process!