You would like to contribute to the project itself?
Great! No matter if it's fixing a few typos or adding a whole feature - every contribution is welcome.
You can see a list of all features that still need to be worked on, are in progress or are finished in the repo's projects section.
Please read this page before diving in, it contains a few very important points! (I'm serious)
- Reporting an issue
- How to fork and open pull requests
- Updating or Adding a language translation
- Styling guidelines
- Starting the bot
Found a bug/error?
Please report it by creating an issue. I'll respond as soon as possible.
If you've got a feature request instead, you can choose the "Feature request" template.
If you have any questions, please open a Q&A discussion instead!
To contribute code to the project, you first need to fork this repository. Go to the main page of this repository and click on the "Fork" button in the top right.
Before clicking the "Create fork" button in the next menu, make sure the checkmark at "Copy the master branch only" is unchecked!
After waiting a few seconds you should now have a copy of the repository on your account.
Assuming you already have git installed on your computer, open a folder on your PC where the project should be stored.
Open a terminal in this location and run the command
git clone https://github.com/your-username/steam-comment-service-bot
...or use any other Git Client of your choice.
Once the repository has been cloned, switch to the beta-testing branch using the command git checkout beta-testing.
This branch contains the latest changes and must be the one you base your changes off of. The master branch contains the latest release.
You can now create your own branch using git checkout -b "branchname", make changes and commit them to it.
It makes sense to give the branch a sensible name based on what your changes will be, but no pressure.
The setup of your dev bot is very similar to the normal setup, however make sure to run the command npm install in your terminal manually.
This will install all dev dependencies, which are omitted in the normal installation to save space.
It is probably also a good idea to enable printDebug in advancedconfig.json to see a more detailed log output.
Make sure you have read 'Starting the bot' at the bottom of the page, before starting the bot to test your changes.
Once you have made your changes and verified they are working as expected, you need to open a Pull Request to get them merged into this repository.
Click here, click on "Compare across forks" at the top and select base: beta-testing on the left side.
Then, choose your fork on the right at head repository:, your branch at compare: and click on "Create Pull Request".
Give your pull request a fitting title which describes your changes in a few words and put a more in depth explanation below in the description.
Once you are satisfied, hit the "Create pull request" button below to submit.
I'll take a look at it and perhaps suggest or make some minor changes in the following few days.
Once everything looks good, I will merge your changes and they will be included in the next version.
The bot includes more translations than languages I speak myself - so I need your help here!
Updating an existing language:
I'm changing or adding new messages nearly every update, so there are often language strings that need to be updated.
It'd be great if you could help!
Open one of the existing languages located in src/data/lang (except English, that is the default file which I'm updating myself) with a text editor.
Find an untranslated value in the file (the message will be in English) and translate it into the correct language.
Continue reading here for information about variables and contributing the changes you just made.
Adding a new language:
You know an unsupported language and would like to contribute a translation? Cool!
Create a new .json file in the src/data/lang/ directory with the name of the language in English (e.g. "german" instead of "deutsch").
Please also make sure the filename is lowercase, like the other ones.
Open the file, copy the content of english.json into your file and start translating the value of every key (except the key langname, it must be the same as the filename).
Keep on reading below.
Applies to both:
Some language strings contain variables which are replaced by the bot with corresponding values at runtime.
These are marked with ${variablename} and must occur like that in your translated string as well.
Every \n is a so called escape character, which in this case represents a line break.
At a few points you also see a \". The backslash in this case prevents the " from ending the string and instead appearing unmodified in the message later on.
Both must occur unedited in the translated string. So just don't think about them and don't worry too much.
Some strings also contain command syntax information which must not be translated, like for example in the key updaterautoupdatedisabled at the very end: "update true"
These are sadly not 100% obvious but you should be able to recognize them fairly easily.
When you are done, open a PR like explained above in How to fork and open pull requests.
Should you want to test your translation, please make sure to read Starting the bot below. Your changes may otherwise get lost!
Should you get an error while starting, make sure your syntax is correct. Common mistakes are for example missing quotation marks " or missing commas , at line ends.
Please make sure your code is somewhat good looking, is easy to read and is properly documented.
Take a look at any of the other source code files in the project to see how I style my code.
The project includes an eslint config to enforce the project's styling rules, so please make sure your eslint installation works.
It should be included as a dev dependency when setting up the project on your machine.
While working on your code, eslint should automatically display warnings or errors for parts of your code if you are using an IDE.
To run the linter manually, you can execute the command npx eslint . in the project folder.
Please make sure to fix all eslint errors and warnings before submitting a pull request.
In short, the main styling rules are:
- Spaces for indentation with a size of
4 - camelCase for variables and functions
- Opening braces on the same line as the if/for/while statement
- Do not omit semicolons at line ends
- Do not use
varbutlet&constinstead - Provide JsDocs for your functions, these are also used to generate typescript bindings later on
When starting the bot during development, it is crucial to update every file's checksum, on every change.
You can do this easily by starting the bot using the command: npm run dev
This ensures that fileStructure.json, which contains checksums for every file, gets updated.
The application will otherwise recognize your changed file as broken and will restore it with the default one.
Thanks for taking your time!