Please read through this document before submitting any issues or pull requests to ensure we have all the necessary information to effectively respond to your bug report or contribution.

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Contributing Guidelines

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For Pull Request(s)

Contributions via pull requests are much appreciated. Once the approach is agreed upon ✅, make your changes and open a Pull Request(s). Before sending us a pull request, please ensure that,
  • Fork the repo on GitHub, clone it on your machine.
  • Create a branch with your changes.
  • You are working against the latest source on the develop branch.
  • Modify the source; please focus only on the specific change.
  • Ensure local tests pass.
  • Commit to your fork using clear commit messages.
  • Send us a pull request.
  • Pay attention to any automated CI failures reported in the pull request.
  • Stay involved in the conversation
Please note: If you want to work on an issue, please ask the maintainers to assign the issue to you before starting work on it. This would help us understand who is working on an issue and prevent duplicate work. 🙏🏻

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Local Setup Prerequisites

  • The application currently supports Node.js v18.x.
  • pnpm packages manager, (from pnpm guide pick any installation method).

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Contribute to Backend

  • Clone the bigcapital repository and cd into bigcapital directory.
  • Create .env file by copying .env.example file to .env. (The .env.example file has all the necessary values of variables to start development directly).
cp .env.example .env
  • Install all npm dependencies of the monorepo, you don’t have to change directory to the backend package. just hit the command on root directory and it will install dependencies of all packages.
pnpm install
  • Run all required docker containers in the development, we already configured all containers under docker-compose.yml.
docker-compose up -d
Wait some seconds, and hit docker-compose ps and you should see the same result below. 
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE              COMMAND                  CREATED         STATUS        PORTS                               NAMES
d974edfab9df   bigcapital-mysql   "docker-entrypoint.s…"   7 seconds ago   Up 1 second   0.0.0.0:3306->3306/tcp, 33060/tcp   bigcapital-mysql-1
cefa73fe2881   bigcapital-redis   "docker-entrypoint.s…"   7 seconds ago   Up 1 second   6379/tcp                            bigcapital-redis-1
1ea059198cb4   bigcapital-mongo   "docker-entrypoint.s…"   7 seconds ago   Up 1 second   0.0.0.0:27017->27017/tcp            bigcapital-mongo-1
  • There’re some CLI commands we should run before running the server like databaase migration, so we need to build the server app first.
pnpm run build:server
  • Run the database migration for system database.
node packages/server/build/commands.js system:migrate:latest
And you should get something like that. 
Batch 1 run: 6 migrations
  • Next, start the webapp application.
pnpm run dev:server

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Contribute to Frontend

  • Clone the bigcapital repository and cd into bigcapital directory.
git clone https://github.com/bigcapital/bigcapital.git && cd bigcaptial
  • Install all npm dependencies of the monorepo, you don’t have to change directory to the frontend package. just hit that command and will install all packages across all application.
pnpm install
  • Next, start the webapp application.
pnpm run dev:webapp

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Code Review

We welcome constructive criticism and feedback on code submitted by contributors. All feedback should be constructive and respectful, and should focus on the code rather than the contributor. Code review may include suggestions for improvement or changes to the code.

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Other Ways to Contribute

There are many other ways to get involved with the community and to participate in this project:
  • Use the product, submitting GitHub issues when a problem is found.
  • Help code review pull requests and participate in issue threads.
  • Submit a new feature request as an issue.
  • Help answer questions on forums such as Bigcapital Community Discord Channel.
  • Tell others about the project on Twitter, your blog, etc.
Again, Feel free to ping us on #contributing on our Discord community if you need any help on this :) Thank You!