How to Contribute

We’re always looking for people to help make Kavita even better, there are several ways to contribute.

Development

Tools required

• Rider (Suggested)
• Visual Studio 2019 or higher. The community version is free and works fine. Download it here
• HTML/Javascript editor of choice (VS Code/Sublime Text/Webstorm/Atom/Notepad++/etc)
• Git style tool like Git or Github Desktop
• NodeJS (Node 18.13.X or higher)
• .NET 8.0+
• dotnet tool install -g Swashbuckle.AspNetCore.Cli

Getting started

1. Fork Kavita
2. Clone the repository into your development machine. Info
3. Install the required Node Packages

cd Kavita/UI/Web
npm install
npm install -g @angular/cli

4. Start angular server npm run start
5. Build the project in Visual Studio/Rider, Setting the startup project to API
6. Debug the project in Visual Studio/Rider
7. Open http://localhost:4200
8. (Deployment only) Run build.sh and pass the Runtime Identifier for your OS or just build.sh for all supported RIDs.

Contributing Code

• If you’re adding a new, already requested feature, please comment on Github Issues so work is not duplicated (If you want to add something not already on there, please talk to us first)
• Rebase from Kavita’s develop branch, don’t merge
• Make meaningful commits, or squash them
• Feel free to make a pull request before work is complete, this will let us see where it is at and make comments/suggest improvements
• Add tests (unit/integration)
• Commit with *nix line endings for consistency (We checkout Windows and commit *nix)
• One feature/bug fix per pull request to keep things clean and easy to understand
• Use 4 spaces instead of tabs, this is the default for VS 2019 and WebStorm (to my knowledge)
  • Use 2 spaces for UI files

Pull Requesting

• Only make pull requests to develop, never main, if you make a PR to main we’ll comment on it and close it
• You’re probably going to get some comments or questions from us, they will be to ensure consistency and maintainability
• We’ll try to respond to pull requests as soon as possible, if it has been a day or two, please reach out to us, we may have missed it
• Each PR should come from its own feature branch and not develop in your fork, it should have a meaningful branch name (what is being added/fixed)
  • new-feature (Bad)
  • fix-bug (Bad)
  • patch (Bad)
  • develop (Bad)
  • feature/parser-enhancements (Great)
  • bugfix/book-issues (Great)

Swagger API

If you just want to play with Swagger, you can just

• cd Kavita/API
• dotnet run -c Debug
• Go to http://localhost:5000/swagger/index.html

If you have any questions about any of this, please let us know.