Contributing to Dream

Contributions are very welcome. This includes not only code PRs, but also:

• Examples
• Docs fixes
• Bug reports
• Links to blogs — different people benefit from different presentations!
• Links to projects that use Dream — to serve as large examples
• Links to libraries to use with Dream
• And more!

Bugs

To get the version of Dream installed in a project that uses it, run

opam list dream

or

npx esy ls-builds

Code

If you'd like to contribute code, clone the repository with

git clone https://github.com/camlworks/dream.git
cd dream

Later, you'll need to fork the repository on GitHub, and add your fork as a remote:

git remote add fork git@github.com:my-github-name/dream.git

Install Dream's dependencies:

make deps

If you don't have an opam switch ready, first create one with

opam switch create . 4.14.1 --no-install

You can now add some code that will exercise your change, so you can test it as you work. There are two main places for this:

1. The tests in test/. They can be run with make test. View the generated coverage report in _coverage/index.html to see how much the tests exercise your changes.

   To run tests from a single directory, for example test/expect/pure, run make test TEST=test/expect/pure.

2. The tests can also be run in watch mode using make test-watch. This is not compatible with coverage reports at the moment.

3. The examples in example/. I often test changes by modifying an example that is almost on topic for the code I'm changing, and then not committing the example. In some cases, though, it's easiest to fork or write a new example for some new code, and commit it. New examples greatly appreciated! To build any of the examples against your own clone of Dream, do

   cd example/1-hello
   dune exec ./hello.exe
   

   Make sure not to run esy using the commands given in each example, nor use --root ., as these options both will sandbox the build, and build against a published version of Dream (whether in a package manager or on GitHub), rather than against your local clone.

Commit the code and push to your fork:

git add .
git commit
git push -u fork my-branch

GitHub should print a URL into your terminal for opening a pull request.

Note: Please don't force-push into a PR — it makes incremental review very difficult, and we will squash-merge most PRs anyway!

Note: Please don't resolve conversations in PRs. Reviewers use resolving conversations to keep track of what has been addressed.

If you need to link to the local version of Dream from a project that lives in a different directory, and you are using esy, add this line to your esy.json:

{
   ...
   "resolutions": {
     ...
     "@opam/dream": "link:path/to/dream.opam"
   },
}

Then, run

npx esy install
npx esy build
npx esy start

Don't forget the esy build step, which is necessary to build the local dependency.

Docs

To build the docs, go to docs/web/ and run

make deps

This will install npm and opam packages. In particular, the site currently requires odoc 2.0.2, Soupault, and a specific version of Highlight.js.

After that, back in the project root,

cd ../..

Run

make docs

to build the docs locally. They are output to docs/web/build/index.html.

You can also use

make docs-watch

to rebuild the docs automatically as you write them.