# Welcome to the contributing guide for the plugin peertube-plugin-livechat

Interested in contributing? Awesome!

## Code of conduct

Please read the [CODE_OF_CONDUCT](CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md).

## Translate

You can help us to translate this PeerTube plugin by creating or modifying translation files in the `languages` folder.

Please work on the `develop` branch, and do your commits and pull request on this branch.

If the language you are interesting in does not exist yet, create a file `code.json` in the `languages` folder, where `code` is the language code.
The language code must be the same as the Peertube's langage code (see [Peertube documentation](https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/support/doc/translation.md)).
Then add the language file in the [package.json](package.json) file, under the key `translations`.

Translation strings are set in the language file as follow:

- files are in [JSON format](https://www.json.org)
- the JSON key is the english string (see existing keys in the [french translation file](languages/fr.json)).
- the JSON value is the translating string
- NB: there is no english translation file (this is how translation works for peertube's plugins)

## Give your feedback

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

## Develop

Always talk about features you want to develop by creating/finding and commenting the issue tackling your problem
before you start working on it, and inform the community that you begin coding by claiming the issue.

Please use the `develop` branch. The `main` branch is reserved to released versions of the plugin, so that the documentation is always synchronized with the released version of the plugin.
Once you are ready to show your code to ask for feedback, submit a *draft* Pull Request.
Once you are ready for a code review before merge, submit a Pull Request. In any case, please
link your PR to the issues it solves by using the GitHub syntax: "fixes #issue_number".

The front-end code is in the `client` folder, the back-end code in `server`. There are some shared code in `shared` folder.

For general instructions (developping plugins, building, installation, ...), please refer to the [Peertube documentation](https://docs.joinpeertube.org/contribute-plugins?id=write-a-plugintheme).

You can build the plugin with extra debug features simply by using:

```bash
NODE_ENV=dev npm run build
```