Contributing to Tab for a Cause!

It's been a long year of many efforts, but I'm excited to be back and blogging on ways to contribute to open source!

Recently, I've been looking at a project called Tab For A Cause, which is a cute little chrome extension that enables you to donate ad revenue to the charity of your choice! They have a couple open issues, including some good starter ones for frontend developers trying to dip their toes into the open source world.

In this blog post, I'll talk you through the steps of how to get set up to contribute, and at the end, I'll talk you through what I plan on doing next!

Getting Started:

First off, I checked out their git repo to see if there were any contributing guidelines or any setup steps in the README. There wasn't a community contribution guidelines doc, but the README did provide some basic prerequisite requirements as well as setup steps.

Installing the Prerequisites

I'm working on a Mac, so I am using Homebrew to handle my installations. As of November 2022, the only pre-reqs for setting up Tab for a Cause locally are docker and yarn. To install those, I ran the following commands:

brew install yarn;
brew install docker --cask;

To complete the setup of docker, and to make sure the symbolic links to docker and docker-compose are made, you will need to run Docker at least once. You will see a pop-up stating that Docker needs privileged access. Hit yes, and enter your password to confirm the granting of permission. Once that's done, you will be good to go! Try running docker --v in a fresh terminal to confirm. You should see something like this:

$ docker -v 
Docker version 20.10.21, build baeda1f

If you are running Linux, use your package manager of choice to install the pre-reqs.

If you're using Windows, feel free to use your package manager if you have one (I typically use Chocolatey) or install them via the installation steps specified by Yarn and the installation steps specified by Docker.

Now that I have the pre-reqs installed, I'm ready to move on to the project-specific setup steps.

Project setup

The next step is to run yarn run build. This step may take a bit, so be patient! This will install all the dependencies needed to run the application, as well as build the docker images.

Next, run yarn run start:newtab . You may seem some errors, but don't worry, we'll take care of those in a moment! In this first run, it attempts to access a few things which haven't been created yet (including the graphql server and a few generated yaml files). When it fails to find them, it creates them. After a few restarts of the application, you will be greeted by a message which looks something like this:

[graphql] GraphiQL is enabled on port 8080.
[graphql] GraphQL server is now running on http://localhost:8080
[docker] tab-dynamodb-1 | Initializing DynamoDB Local with the following configuration:
[docker] tab-dynamodb-1 | Port: 8000
[docker] tab-dynamodb-1 | InMemory: false
[docker] tab-dynamodb-1 | DbPath: /opt/dynamodb/db
[docker] tab-dynamodb-1 | SharedDb: true
[docker] tab-dynamodb-1 | shouldDelayTransientStatuses: false
[docker] tab-dynamodb-1 | CorsParams: null
[docker] tab-dynamodb-1 |
[docker] tab-dbadmin-1 | dynamodb-admin listening on port 8001

Now we've got one more step left to do before we can start tackling our first issue. We need to create the database tables that the server is interfacing with. So go ahead and open a new tab in your terminal, navigate to the tab repo, and run the following commands:

cd dynamodb;
yarn run init;

NOTE: It's very important that you still have the server running. The yarn run init command relies on interfacing with the graphql server to generate the tables.

Alrighty, we should be ready to go, right? Wrong! We still need to fix those couple of issues we ran into when starting up the graphql server.

Fixing the Graphql Setup Errors

Let's kill the server and get started on debugging those errors we saw initially when we started setting up the graphql server.

The first error we saw was a TypeError generated by the chokidar library (which is one of the project's dependencies). The error was TypeError: fsevents is not a constructor. After a quick google, I found this stackoverflow answer . Essentially, the issue we are encountering is that this project was originally created using create-react-app, which provides a fully configured environment with reasonable defaults that hides a lot of the infrastructure from you to keep development as easy as possible on folks who are new to react. It allows you to hit the ground running with your react application without needing to learn about underlying infrastructure tools like Webpack in exchange for losing some flexibility in customizing your dev vs prod targets.

Given that this project is still expecting the underlying infrastructure to be handled for it, we need to run the following command to install the tools which will do that for us:

yarn add --exact react-scripts@3.0.1.

Once that's done, let's try running things again with:

yarn run start:newtab

Congratulations! You now have an instance for Tab for a Cause up and running!

(If you're still worried about those remaining couple errors/warnings, me too, but we'll get back around to those in the next blog post! For now, let's go take a look at the running instance.)

Playing Around with Tab For A Cause

At this point, you should be able to open your preferred browser, navigate to http://localhost:3000/newtab/, and see something like this:

As you can see, we still don't have everything fully functional (we don't have ads up and running), but that's okay! We've made progress.

At this point, I'd recommend opening up https://tab.gladly.io/newtab/ and making sure what you're seeing on your localhost is something similar to what is being displayed there. Remember, locally you're running the tip of main, so there may be some extra features that you have in your local version that haven't been rolled out quite yet.

Next Steps

At this point, I have a mostly functional local Tab for a Cause setup, so I have a few options now that I want to contribute. In any open source community, the first thing you should check out is their Community Contribution Guidelines (if they have one). Given that the Gladly Team does not have a contribution guide (as of Nov 2022), the next best thing to do is to check out their open issues and see if there are any marked as "Good first issue" or "Hacktoberfest". These are two common tag used by open source communities on Github to indicate good starter bugs/features for someone new to their development community.

In my next blog post, I will walk you through my process of solving my very first bug for Tab for a Cause and how I solved it.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Linker for Perl 6

As mentioned in my last post, I'm working on making a linker for Perl 6 user programs as part of the Google Summer of Code. I'll be making weekly progress updates here explaining what I've done and  In this post, I'm going to cover why a linker is useful/what a linker is, how I'm approaching the project, and what progress I've made so far. I'm learning a lot of this as I go, so if you see something that's confusing or incorrect, please let me know so I can fix it! What does a linker do? The TLDR version is that a linker is what takes all the object files generated by compilation, resolves the calls to functions in libraries and other files, and combines them into a single executable file. Being able to generate this single executable file is extremely useful as it means that once the program has been "translated" from whatever language it was written in into bytecode and grouped into an executable order, you can run that program over and
Read more

Getting Started: Developing for Perl 6

Three weeks ago, I started a Google Summer of Code project working on a linker for Perl 6 user programs . Getting started on a new project with a new group of people is always hard, primarily because it can be hard to figure out where to start or who to reach out to. This GSoC project has been no exception. That being said, the Perl 6 community is one of the kindest, most helpful online communities I've run into and appears to have no qualms assisting a new contributor in getting up to speed. So far, the biggest challenges I've run into have been figuring out what I didn't know about how to get started, figuring out IRC, and getting my development environment set up. Figuring out what I didn't know Perl 6 is a big language. Prior to this summer, I had very little exposure to Perl, Perl 6, or interpreted languages in general. Thankfully, Perl 6 has pretty substantial documentation, and the source code is pretty well commented too. Information on linkers is har
Read more

Modifying Perl 6 Executable to Run Bytecode

Image
Exciting news! I've successfully modified  perl6  to run bytecode! You can look through my changes on Github here . In this post, I'm going to briefly go over what happens when you run perl6 , what I added to get the additional functionality, a few issues I ran into along the way, and what I'm doing next. What does running perl6  do? Let's imagine you are using MoarVM as your backend, Rakudo as your compiler, and have just written the program foo.pl6  and want to run it. You call perl6 foo.pl6.  What happens next? main.nqp begins to execute. This is the very beginning of the initialization process necessary for your program to run. An instance of the compiler  is created and set up . The path to the various Perl6 and NQP libraries that you may need are determined and bound to environment variables. Several command line options are added . Then, the compiler is actually entered with a call to command_line . command_line begins to execute. This method looks at
Read more