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How to Contribute

So you want to contribute to the project. THIS IS GREAT NEWS!

Seriously. We're all pretty happy about this.

Getting set up to contribute

Fork the homebrew-cask repository as per instructions in the GitHub help pages:

Fork the repository in GitHub with the 'Fork' button
Clone your GitHub fork into your computer
Configure upstream remote to point at phinze/homebrew-cask.

Adding a Cask

Making a Cask is easy: a Cask is a Ruby file that is only seven lines long. See the Cask for Alfred.app for an example:

class Alfred < Cask
  url 'http://cachefly.alfredapp.com/alfred_1.3.2_265.zip'
  homepage 'http://www.alfredapp.com/'
  version '1.3.2_265'
  sha1 'e10f15a0ae758cae2a22557f14890fa5989260ce'
end

Preliminary steps

Go to the folder in which you cloned phinze/homebrew-cask (assuming ~/homebrew-cask)

$ cd ~/homebrew-cask

If you have forked a longer while ago, there might be upstream changes. Pull those in (assuming upstream branch is called upstream):

$ git fetch upstream
# Fetches any new changes from the original repo
$ git checkout master
# Check out branch "master" (just to make sure)
$ git merge upstream/master
# Merges any changes fetched into your working files

Make a topic branch for your work

$ git checkout -b my-branch
# Create a new branch called "my-branch" and make it active

Write the Cask file

Copy a template cask to help writing the new one

$ cp test/support/Casks/basic-cask.rb Casks/my-app.rb

Edit the Cask with your preferred editor

$ emacs Casks/my-app.rb

Include the following fields in your Cask: * URL to the .dmg/.zip file that contains the application (currently only .app files are supported) * Application homepage * Application version * Checksum of the file

In order to find out the checksum for the file, you need to download the file and then:

$ curl -OL http://example-server.com/path/to/file/my-app.dmg
# Download the file that contains the application
$ shasum my-app.dmg
# Calculate SHA-1 sum for the downloaded file

Some developers (like Mozilla) and hosts (like Sourceforge) provide checksums, so you can use those directly, without needing to download the file separately.

In addition to sha1 you can provide the checksum with md5, sha256, or sha512 in the same manner. Use commands md5 my-app.dmg or shasum -a 256 my-app.dmg to obtain these checksums.

If the application does not have versioned downloads, you can provide option no_checksum, which takes no arguments.

This is all you need to do to write a Cask!

Testing your new Cask

When Casks are installed, they are searched in /usr/local/Library/Taps. You can replace the files in folder phinze-cask but you are recommended to make your own folder in which you place the tested Casks.

$ mkdir -p /usr/local/Library/Taps/my-casks/Casks
# Create directory in which the tested Casks are placed
$ ln -s ~/homebrew-cask/Casks/my-app.rb /usr/local/Library/Taps/my-casks/Casks
# Create a symbolic link to the Cask you created

Now you can either audit your Cask with brew cask audit my-app or try to install it: brew cask install my-app.

Did it install? If yes, you can continue with submitting a pull request. If something went wrong, brew cask uninstall my-app and edit your Cask in ~/homebrew-cask/Casks/my-app.rb or whereever you placed it. Since you created a symbolic link in /usr/local/Library/Taps/my-casks/Casks, changes are automatically reflected in there, so you can directly try installing after those changes.

If your application and homebrew-cask do not work well together, feel free to file an issue after checking out open issues.

Working on homebrew-cask itself

If you'd like to hack on the ruby code in the project itself, one way to play with changes is to symlink the rubylib folder to your working repository. So assuming your fork is cloned at ~/homebrew-cask you could do something like this:

$ cd $(brew --prefix brew-cask)
$ mv rubylib{,.orig}
$ ln -s ~/homebrew-cask/lib rubylib

Now you can hack on ~/homebrew-cask and use the cli to interact with the code.

Mind the test suite!

If you're making changes - please write some tests for them! Also be sure to run the whole test suite before submitting (if you forget Travis-CI will do that for you and embarass you in front of all your friends). :)

Submitting your Changes

Now that you have your Cask ready and you have verified it works correctly, you can commit your changes and submit a pull request.

Committing your changes

Go back to the folder in which you cloned homebrew-cask. Use git status to verify that you are on the right branch and that you have changed the right files.

Stage your Cask with git add Casks/my-app.rb. You can view the changes that are to be committed with git diff --cached.
Commit your changes with git commit. Write your commit message with
- the first line being commit summary, 50 characters or less,
- followed by an empty line
- and an explanation of the commit, wrapped to 72 characters. See a note about git commit messages for a more thorough explanation.
Push your changes to your GitHub account: git push origin my-branch.

Filing a pull request on GitHub

Now go to your GitHub repository at https://github.com/your-github-username/homebrew-cask, switch branch to your topic branch and click on 'Pull Request' button. You can then add further comments to your pull request.

You are done now, and your Cask should be pulled in or otherwise noticed in a while.

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