Development Workflow

1.
Start working on an issue you’re assigned to. If you’re not assigned to any issue, find the issue with the highest priority you can work on, by relevant label and assign it to yourself. Priority is given by milestones. You should always check issues in the current milestone, then short-term, middle-term and long-term in that order.
2.
You are responsible for the issue that you're assigned to. If you are not able to do it or you believe you won't make it to the selected milestone, talk to your team, lead or manager to have it reassigned or postponed.
3.
Once your code has been deployed in the release-candidate environment, please verify that your changes work as intended. We have seen issues where bugs did not appear in development but showed in production (e.g. due to merge issues).
Choosing something to work on
Start working on things with the highest priority in the current milestone. The priority of items are defined under labels in the repository, but you are able to sort by priority.
After sorting by priority, choose something that you’re able to tackle and falls under your responsibility. Take a good look on our labels and see which ones apply for your position.
To filter very precisely, you could filter all issues for:
Milestone: Whichever is the current version
Assignee: Unassigned
Label: Your label of choice. For instance feat: api, feat: integration / plugin, feat: webrtc, subj: ui/ux, subj: security
Sort by priority
If you’re in doubt about what to work on, ask your team, lead or manager. They will be able to tell you.
Creating a Pull Request
Anytime you start to work on something different, make sure you create or switch to a branch specific to the feature you're working on. You can choose to create a Pull Request anytime during your development phase, just make sure you add the label stat: in progress while the PR is not ready for merge (and remember to remove the label when it is). When naming your Pull Request, please start the name with one the following tags for identifying changes:
[NEW] for new features (eg.: [NEW] WhiteBoard integration)
[FIX] for bug fixes. You should include the issue number(s) in parenthesis, whenever possible. (eg.: [FIX] OTR timeout problems (#629, #2535))
[BREAK] for giving proper attention to changes that will break previous versions of Rocket.Chat (eg.: [BREAK] Change notification setting type from boolean to string)
Getting your pull request reviewed, approved, and merged
There are a few rules to get your pull request accepted:
1.
All checks have passed
2.
Travis CI runs automatically when you push your pull request. If Travis fails, take a look at the reasons for failing. If it fails for no apparent reason, try running it again.
3.
You must sign the Contributor License Agreement (CLA)​
4.
At least one team member must approve the Pull Request. If you don't know who to ask for an approval, let your team, lead or manager know you need one, and someone will be assigned as reviewer.
Finishing a release branch
When the state of the release-candidate branch is ready to become a real release, some actions need to be carried out. First, the release branch is merged into master (since every commit on master is a new release by definition). Next, that commit on master must be tagged for easy future reference to this historical version. Finally, the changes made on the release-candidate branch need to be merged back into develop, so that future releases also contain these bug fixes.
The release process is as follows:
1
$ git checkout master
2
Switched to branch 'master'
3
$ git merge --no-ff release-candidate
4
Merge made by recursive.
5
(Summary of changes)
6
$ git tag -a [version number]
Copied!
To keep the changes made in the release branch, we need to merge those back into develop, though. In Git:
1
$ git checkout develop
2
Switched to branch 'develop'
3
$ git merge --no-ff release-candidate
4
Merge made by recursive.
5
(Summary of changes)
Copied!
To create the new release-candidate based on develop:
1
$ git checkout release-candidate
2
Switched to branch 'release-candidate'
3
$ git merge --no-ff develop
4
Merge made by recursive.
5
(Summary of changes)
Copied!
Every team member should strive to thoroughly test the release-candidate branch, especially regarding issues they've worked on. Any bug-fixes applied to release-candidate should immediately be cherry-picked into develop.
You may read all about our branching model on A successful Git branching model, by Vincent Driessen​
Hotfixes
Hotfix branches are very much like release branches in that they are also meant to prepare for a new production release, albeit unplanned. They arise from the necessity to act immediately upon an undesired state of a live production version. When a critical bug in a production version must be resolved immediately, a hotfix branch may be branched off from the corresponding tag on the master branch that marks the production version.
Hotfix branches are created from the master branch:
1
$ git checkout -b hotfix-[current-version].[sub-version] master
2
Switched to a new branch "hotfix-X.X.X"
Copied!
Then, fix the bug and commit the fix. Later, merge the bugfix into master and also into release-candidate (and develop if the bugfix cannot wait for the release branch to be finished).
1
$ git commit -m "Fixed severe production problem"
2
[hotfix-X.X.X abc12d3] Fixed severe production problem
3
5 files changed, 32 insertions(+), 17 deletions(-)
4
​
5
$ git checkout master
6
Switched to branch 'master'
7
$ git merge --no-ff hotfix-X.X.X
8
Merge made by recursive.
9
(Summary of changes)
10
$ git tag -a [current-version].[sub-version]
11
​
12
$ git checkout release-candidate
13
Switched to branch 'release-candidate'
14
$ git merge --no-ff hotfix-X.X.X
15
Merge made by recursive.
16
(Summary of changes)
Copied!
Error reporting
We use GitHub Issues as our error reporting tool. When creating a new issue, always state the version you're working on (write the version number, not latest). If you don't know the version you're working on, access /api/info on your instance. Include as much detailed information as you can, such as animated gifs and/or screenshots of error, code samples and reproduction steps.
Labelling issues
To allow for asynchronous issue handling, we use milestones and labels. Leads and product managers handle most of the scheduling into milestones. Labelling is a task for everyone.
Most issues will have labels for at least one of the following:
Feat (feat: accessibility, feat: embed, feat: livechat, etc.)
Subject (subj: mobile, subj: security, subj: ui/ux, etc.)
Type (type: bug, type: new feature, type: discussion, etc.)
All labels are listed on the labels page.
Labels for community contributors
Issues that are beneficial to our users, 'nice to haves', that we currently do not have the capacity for or want to give the priority to, are labeled as contrib:, so the community can make a contribution. We categorize them into easy, intermediate and experts needed to help contributors pick an issue to work on when joining the project, based on how difficult is the work we believe the issue demands.

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Code Style Guide

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Contents

Choosing something to work on

Creating a Pull Request

Getting your pull request reviewed, approved, and merged

Finishing a release branch

Hotfixes

Error reporting

Labelling issues

Labels for community contributors