Community Guide

The number of Wails users is growing at an incredible rate, and if you're reading this, chances are you're ready to join. So... welcome!

Resources

Code of Conduct

This Code of Conduct is an easy guide to develop the technical communities in which we participate.

Stay in the Know

• Follow our official Twitter account.

Get Support

• GitHub - If you have a bug to report or feature to request, that's what the GitHub issues are for. Please respect the rules specified in each repository's issue template.
• Discord - A place for Wails devs to meet and chat in real time.
• QQ Group(中文) - A Wails group for Chinese developers to communicate, where you can get help from other developers.

Explore the Ecosystem

• The Awesome Wails Page - See what other awesome resources have been published by other awesome people.

Ways of contributing

Wails is an open source, community driven project. We welcome anyone to join us in contributing to the project. This documentation is aimed at anyone wishing to get familiar with the project and the development processes.

There are many ways to contribute to the project:

• Developing new features
• Fixing bugs
• Testing
• Documenting features
• Writing tutorials / guides
• Helping others on the issues + discussions boards

Guides for these have been created in their own sections. Before getting started, please introduce yourself in the Contributing to Wails discussion.

Developing New Features

We are always keen to add features to Wails and expand on what the project can do. The process for adding new features are as follows:

• Pick an enhancement ticket with the "TODO" label. It's preferable to select one from the current Backlog but the choice is yours.
• Before developing, check that the ticket includes the following information:
  • The purpose of the enhancement
  • What is out of scope for the enhancement
  • What platforms the enhancement targets (most features should be cross-platform unless there's a very specific reason)
• If the ticket does not include this information, feel free to request the information from the person who opened the ticket. Sometimes placeholder tickets are created and require more details
• Comment on the ticket stating if you wish to develop the feature
• Clone the repository and create a branch with the format feature/<ticket_number>_<ticket_title>
• New features often require documentation so please ensure you have also added or updated the documentation as part of the changes
• Once the feature is ready for testing, create a draft PR. Please ensure the PR description has the test scenarios and test cases listed with checkmarks, so that others can know what still needs to be tested.
• Once all the testing is completed, please update the status of the PR from draft and leave a message.

:::note There is nothing stopping you from opening a ticket and working on it yourself, but please be aware that all enhancement requests are reviewed for good fit. Not all ideas will be selected, so it's best to have discussion about the enhancement first. :::

:::warning Any PRs opened without a corresponding ticket may be rejected. :::

Fixing Bugs

The process for fixing bugs are as follows:

• Check the current Backlog and select a bug to fix
• Before developing, check that the ticket includes the following information:
• The scope of the issue including platforms affected
• The steps to reproduce. Sometimes bugs are opened that are not Wails issues and the onus is on the reporter to prove that it is a Wails issue with a minimal reproducible example
• The output of wails doctor
• A test that can reproduce the bug
• If the ticket does not include this information, feel free to request the information from the person who opened the ticket.
• Comment on the ticket stating you wish to develop a fix
• Clone the repository and create a branch with the format bugfix/<ticket_number>_<ticket_title>
• Once the fix is ready for testing, create a draft PR. Please ensure the PR description has the test scenarios and test cases listed with checkmarks, so that others can know what still needs to be tested.
• Once all the testing is completed, please update the status of the PR from draft and leave a message.

:::note There is nothing stopping you from opening a ticket and working on it yourself, but please be aware that all bugfixes should be discussed as the approach may have unintended side effects. :::

:::warning Any PRs opened without a corresponding ticket may be rejected. :::

Testing

Testing is vitally important to ensure quality in the project. There are a couple of scenarios where testing can really help the project:

• Testing if a bug is reproducible on your local system
• Testing PRs to ensure that they work correctly

If you chose to test if someone's bug report is reproducible on your local system, then feel free to add a comment on the ticket confirming this with the output of wails doctor.

To test PRs, choose a PR to test and check if the PR description has the testing scenarios listed. If not, please ask the person who opened the PR to provide that list. Once you have determined a valid test scenario, please report your findings on the PR.

If you ever need more clarity or help on testing, please ask a question in the Contributing to Wails discussion or on slack.

Documenting

This website is also the main documentation site for the project. Sometimes this gets out of date and needs some slight adjustments. Some of the documentation isn't written to the best standards either. Developing documentation is hard and so any contribution to this is greatly appreciated. Features without documentation are unfinished so to the project, it's as important as the code.

We generally do not create tickets for updating documentation so if there is text you think should be updated or rephrased then feel free to submit a PR for that. This site is in the main repository under the website directory. We use Docusaurus to create the site so there is plenty of existing documentation and tutorials around to get started.

To set up a local documentation development environment, do the following:

• Install npm
• cd website
• npm install
• npm run start

After it has all installed and is running, you should see the site at http://localhost:3000. Any changes made to the site text will be immediately reflected in the browser.

Versioning

We employ a versioning system where we have the "latest" documentation AKA "Next Version" which has all the changes that have occurred since the last release. We also keep the last release documentation as well as the version before that.

There isn't usually a reason to update released documentation so we don't generally update the documents in the versioned_docs or versioned_sidebars directories.

The "next version" docs are mainly in website/docs with some "version independent" documents in src/pages. Any updates should be made in the website/docs directory.

Languages

The default documents of the Wails project are English documents. We use the "crowdin" tool to translate documents in other languages and synchronize them to the website. You can join our project and submit your translations to make contributions.

Add new language

If you want to add a new language to the documentation, please follow the prompts to fill in and submit an Issue. After being confirmed by the maintainer, we will add the language to the "crowdin" and you will then be able to submit your translation.

Helping Others

A great way to contribute to the project is to help others who are experiencing difficulty. This is normally reported as a ticket or a message on the Wails discord server. Even just clarifying the issue can really help out. Sometimes, when an issue is discussed and gets resolved, we create a guide out of it to help others who face the same issues.

To join the Wails discord server, click here.

:::note

Work In Progress

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