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Contribute

There are many ways you can help the Grails development team improve The Grails Framework. And all help is welcome to make a difference, by:

Discussing on the mailing-lists

If you want to discuss a new feature, share interesting findings, and more, then the mailing-lists are the place to go to to start a conversation with the Grails developers and other Grails users. For general usage questions, posting a question on StackOverflow is the way to go.

Reporting issues

The Grails project uses Github issues to report and track issues, feature enhancements, and new features. Be sure to be signed-up and logged-in, as explained below, before proceeding.

Improving the documentation

The documentation of The Grails Framework comes in various forms:

Contributing to this website is fairly easy, if you have a Github account already, as you can click on the Improve this doc buttons that you can see on all the pages of this website. So don't hesitate to help us improve it, fix typos, broken language, clarify complicated sections, add new material, etc.

Please check the following section for more information on how to contribute to our codebase.

Contributing code

If you know the area you want to contribute to, this is great, but if you are looking to make an initial contribution just raise your hand on the Grails developer mailing-list to tell us about your desire to work on a particular problem.

For more complicated tasks, the best approach is also to bring that to the attention of the Grails developers, so they can give you some guidance on how best to tackle a particular problem, discuss implementation ideas and the semantics or scope of the proposed change.

Cloning the code base

To work on the Grails code base, you should be proficient enough in git and you should ideally have an account on Github to be able to create pull requests with your changes.

If you have git installed on your machine, you should be able to clone the Grails repository with the following command:

git clone git://github.com/grails/grails-core.git

Make sure you configure Git appropriately with the same email that you registered with on Github:

git config --global user.name "YOUR NAME"
git config --global user.email "YOUR EMAIL"

You can verify these are configured appropriately by running:

git config --list

Working on the code base

If you are working with the IntelliJ IDEA development environment then you can import the project using the Intellij Gradle Tooling ( "File / Import Project" and select the "build.gradle" file).

To get a local development version of Grails working first run the install task

./gradlew install

Then install SDKman which is the quickest way to setup a development environment.

Once you have SDKman installed point SDKman to your local development version of Grails:

sdk install grails dev /path/to/checkout
sdk use grails dev

Now the "grails" command will be using your development version!

The most important command you will have to run before sending your changes is the test command:

./gradlew test

For a successful contribution, all tests should be green!

Creating a pull request

Once you are satisfied with your changes:

  • commit your changes in your local branch
  • push your changes to your remote branch on Github
  • send us a pull requests

Build status

The Grails sources are tested thanks our continuous integration server.