peertube-plugin-livechat/support/documentation/content/contributing/develop/_index.en.md

+++ title="Develop" description="Develop" weight=40 chapter=false +++

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.

Prerequisite for building this plugin:

• you must have npm installed
• you must have python venv installed (python3-venv package on Debian for example)

To clone the repository:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/JohnXLivingston/peertube-plugin-livechat.git
# Checkout the develop branch
git checkout develop
# Initialize the submodules. This command must be run again if any submodules' version changes.
git submodule update --init --recursive

# Install NPM dependencies and build the module for the first time:
npm install

# Build the plugin after a modification:
npm run build

# If you have a fork from the repository, add it as remote (example):
git remote add me git@github.com:MY_GITHUB_ACCOUNT/peertube-plugin-livechat.git

# Create a local branch for you developments, and checkout it (example):
git checkout my_development # Note: if an issue is associated, use fix_1234 as your branch name (where 1234 is the issue's number)
# To propose your modifications, push your branch to your repository (example):
git push --set-upstream me my_development
# Then go to your github repository with your web browser to propose the Pull Request (see additional instructions below)

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.

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

NODE_ENV=dev npm run build

ESBuild vs Typescript

This plugin uses ESBuild for frontend code generation, as the official peertube-plugin-quickstart plugin. ESBuild can handle Typescript, but does not check types (see ESBuild documentation). That's why we first compile Typescript with the -noEmit option, just to check types (check:client:ts in package.json file). Then, if everything is okay, we run ESBuild to generate the compiled javascript.