peertube/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md

Welcome to the contributing guide for PeerTube

Interested in contributing? Awesome!

This guide will present you the following contribution topics:

• Translate
• Give your feedback
• Write documentation
• Develop
• Improve the website
• Troubleshooting
• Tutorials

Translate

You can help us to translate the PeerTube interface to many languages! See the documentation to know how.

Give your feedback

You don't need to know how to code to start contributing to PeerTube! Other contributions are very valuable too, among which: you can test the software and report bugs, you can give feedback on potential bugs, features that you are interested in, user interface, design, decentralized architecture...

Write documentation

You can help to write the documentation of the REST API, code, architecture, demonstrations.

For the REST API you can see the documentation in /support/doc/api directory. Then, you can just open the openapi.yaml file in a special editor like http://editor.swagger.io/ to easily see and edit the documentation.

Some hints:

• Routes are defined in /server/controllers/ directory
• Parameters validators are defined in /server/middlewares/validators directory
• Models sent/received by the controllers are defined in /shared/models directory

Improve the website

PeerTube's website is joinpeertube.org, where people can learn about the project and how it works – note that it is not a PeerTube instance, but rather the project's homepage.

You can help us improve it too!

It is not hosted on GitHub but on Framasoft's own GitLab instance, FramaGit: https://framagit.org/framasoft/peertube/joinpeertube

Develop

Don't hesitate to talk about features you want to develop by creating/commenting an issue before you start working on them :).

Prerequisites

First, you should use a server or PC with at least 4GB of RAM. Less RAM may lead to crashes.

Make sure that you have followed the steps to install the dependencies.

Then clone the sources and install node modules:

$ git clone https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
$ cd PeerTube
$ yarn install --pure-lockfile

Note that development is done on the develop branch. If you want to hack on Peertube, you should switch to that branch. Also note that you have to repeat the yarn install --pure-lockfile command.

Then, create a postgres database and user with the values set in the config/default.yaml file. For instance, if you do not change the values there, the following commands would create a new database called peertube_dev and a postgres user called peertube with password peertube:

# sudo -u postgres createuser -P peertube
Enter password for new role: peertube
# sudo -u postgres createdb -O peertube peertube_dev

Then enable extensions PeerTube needs:

$ sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE EXTENSION pg_trgm;" peertube_dev
$ sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE EXTENSION unaccent;" peertube_dev

In dev mode, administrator username is root and password is test.

Server side

You can find a documentation of the server code/architecture here.

To develop on the server-side:

$ npm run dev:server

Then, the server will listen on localhost:9000. When server source files change, these are automatically recompiled and the server will automatically restart.

Client side

You can find a documentation of the server code/architecture here.

To develop on the client side:

$ npm run dev:client

The API will listen on localhost:9000 and the frontend on localhost:3000. Client files are automatically compiled on change, and the web browser will reload them automatically thanks to hot module replacement.

Client and server side

The API will listen on localhost:9000 and the frontend on localhost:3000. File changes are automatically recompiled, injected in the web browser (no need to refresh manually) and the web server is automatically restarted.

$ npm run dev

Testing the federation of PeerTube servers

Create a PostgreSQL user with the same name as your username in order to avoid using the postgres user. Then, we can create the databases (if they don't already exist):

$ sudo -u postgres createuser you_username --createdb
$ createdb -O peertube peertube_test{1,2,3}

Build the application and flush the old tests data:

$ npm run build
$ npm run clean:server:test

This will run 3 nodes:

$ npm run play

Then you will get access to the three nodes at http://localhost:900{1,2,3} with the root as username and test{1,2,3} for the password.

Instance configurations are in config/test-{1,2,3}.yaml.

Unit tests

Create a PostgreSQL user with the same name as your username in order to avoid using the postgres user.

Then, we can create the databases (if they don't already exist):

$ sudo -u postgres createuser you_username --createdb --superuser
$ createdb -O peertube peertube_test{1,2,3,4,5,6}

Build the application and run the unit/integration tests:

$ npm run build
$ npm test

If you just want to run 1 test:

$ npm run mocha -- --exit --require ts-node/register/type-check --bail server/tests/api/index.ts

Instance configurations are in config/test-{1,2,3,4,5,6}.yaml. Note that only instance 2 has transcoding enabled.

Troubleshooting

Please check out the issues and list of common errors.

Tutorials

Please check out the related section in the development documentation. Contribute tutorials at framagit.org/framasoft/peertube/documentation.