shoelace/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Shoelace

Shoelace is an open source project, meaning everyone can use it and contribute to its development. When you join our community, you'll find a friendly group of enthusiasts at all experience levels who are willing to chat about anything and everything related to Shoelace.

The easiest way to get started contributing is to join the community chat. This is where we hang out, discuss new ideas, ask for feedback, and more!

A common misconception about contributing to an open source project is that you need to know how to code. This simply isn't true. In fact, there are many ways to contribute, and some of the most important contributions come from those who never write a single line of code. Here's a list of ways you can make a meaningful contribution to the project:

• Submitting well-written bug reports
• Submitting feature requests that are within the scope of the project
• Improving the documentation
• Responding to users that need help in the community chat
• Triaging issues on GitHub
• Being a developer advocate for the project
• Sponsoring the project financially
• Writing tests
• And, of course, contributing code!

Please take a moment to review these guidelines to make the contribution process as easy as possible for both yourself and the project's maintainers.

Using the Issue Tracker

The issue tracker is for bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests.

• Please do not use the issue tracker for personal support requests. Please join the community chat or ask your question on StackOverflow instead.
• Please do not derail, hijack, or troll issues. Keep the discussion on topic and be respectful of others.
• Please do not post comments with "+1" or "👍". Use reactions instead.
• Please do use the issue tracker for feature requests, bug reports, and pull requests.

Issues that do not follow these guidelines are subject to closure. There simply aren't enough resources for the author and contributors to troubleshoot personal support requests.

Feature Requests

Feature requests can be added using the issue tracker.

• Please do search for an existing request before suggesting a new feature.
• Please do use the "👍" reaction to vote for a feature.
• Please do share substantial use cases and perspective that support new features if they haven't already been mentioned.
• Please do not bump, spam, or ping contributors to prioritize your own feature.

If you would like your feature prioritized, please consider sponsoring the project.

Bug Reports

A bug is a demonstrable problem caused by code in the library. Bug reports are an important contribution to the quality of the project. When submitting a bug report, there are a few steps you can take to make sure your issues gets attention quickly.

• Please do not paste in large blocks of irrelevant code
• Please do search for an existing issue before creating a new one
• Please do explain the bug clearly
• Please do provide a minimal test case that demonstrates the bug (e.g. jsfiddle.net or CodePen)
• Please do provide additional information, when necessary, to replicate the bug

A minimal test case is critical to a successful bug report. It demonstrates that the bug exists in the library and not in surrounding code. Contributors should be able to understand the bug without studying your code, otherwise they'll probably move on to another bug.

If you would like your bug prioritized, please consider sponsoring the project.

Pull Requests

To keep the project on track, please consider the following guidelines before submitting a PR.

• Please do not submit a PR without opening an issue first, especially for non-trivial changes. This may prevent you from doing work that won't be accepted for various reasons (e.g. someone is already working on it, it's not a good fit for the project, it needs additional planning, etc.)
• Please do make sure your PR clearly defines what you're changing. Even if you feel your changes are obvious, please explain them so other contributors can more easily review your works. PRs without detailed descriptions are subject to closure pending more details.
• Please do not edit anything in dist/. These files are generated automatically, so you need to edit the source files instead.

The author reserves the right to reject any PR that's outside the scope of the project or doesn't meet code quality standards.

Branches

current - This branch reflects the latest release and powers shoelace.style.

next - This branch is where pull requests will land. It reflects what's coming in the next release, which can be previewed at next.shoelace.style.

Conventions

This section aims to describe some of the design decisions and code conventions that support the project. All contributors are expected to follow conventions and best practices, even those not explicitly defined in this document. When in doubt, refer to existing source code and execute your best judgment.

In order to keep the project in a maintainable state, code that doesn't follow conventions and best practices will need to be refactored before it will be accepted. This isn't a knock on your code or your style — it's something the author considers necessary to operate a successful open source project.

Semantic Versioning

Shoelace follows Semantic Versioning. Breaking changes in components with the "Stable" badge will not be accepted until the next major version. As such, all contributions must consider the project's roadmap and take this into consideration. Features that are deemed no longer necessary will be deprecated but not removed.

Components with the "Experimental" badge should not be used in production. They are made available as release candidates for development and testing purposes. As such, changes to experimental components will not be subject to semantic versioning.

Code Formatting & Linting

The majority of code formatting is handled automatically by Prettier at build time. However, for the best experience, you should install it in your editor and enable format on save.

Linting is run automatically at build time. By design, the project will not build if the linter is unhappy. Contributors are strongly encouraged to install an ESLint plugin for your editor for the best developer experience.

BEM Class Names

All components use a shadow DOM, so styles are completely encapsulated from the rest of the document. As a result, class names inside a component won't conflict with class names outside the component, so we're free to name them whatever we want.

Internally, each component uses the BEM methodology for its class names. There is no technical requirement to do this — it's purely the preference of the author. However, all contributions are expected to follow this practice for the sake of consistency.

Developer Tips

Documentation is the key to success

Nobody likes writing documentation, but not having good docs is frustrating to users and makes the project less appealing. Fortunately, writing documentation for Shoelace is really easy!

A lot of the documentation is generated automatically based on JSDoc comments in each component's source code. If you have ESLint enabled, your editor will tell you when a comment is missing. This may feel a bit naggy, but it's a very good thing. Every property, method, event, etc. is documented this way. By adding comments as you code, the docs are more easily kept up to date.

The documentation pages are served up by Docsify. Check out docs/_sidebar.md and docs/components/ to get an idea of how pages are created and formatted. If you're creating a new component, it may help to use an existing component's markdown file as a template.

If you need help with documentation, feel free to reach out!

Choose composability when possible

When designed right, web components are highly composable, meaning you can easily reuse them in other components. This reduces the overall size of the library, expedites feature development, and maintains a consistent user experience throughout.

The select component, for example, makes use of the dropdown, input, and menu components. Because it's offloading most of its functionality and styles to these lower-level components, the select component remains very lightweight and its appearance and behavior is consistent with other form controls and menus.

When to use a standard property vs. a CSS custom property

When designing a component's API, standard properties ("props") are generally used to change the behavior of a component, whereas CSS custom properties ("CSS variables") are used to change the appearance of a component. Remember that props can't respond to media queries, but CSS variables can.

There are some exceptions to this (e.g. when it significantly improves developer experience), but a good rule of thumbs is "will this need to change based on screen size?" If so, you probably want to use a CSS variable.

When to use a CSS custom property vs. a CSS part

There are two ways to enable customizations for components. One way is with CSS custom properties ("CSS variables"), the other is with CSS parts ("parts").

CSS variables are scoped to the host element and can be reused throughout the component. A good example of a CSS variable would be --border-width, which might get reused throughout a component to ensure borders share the same width for all internal elements.

Parts let you target a specific element inside the component's shadow DOM but, by design, you can't target a part's children or siblings. You can only customize the part itself. Use a part when you need to allow a single element inside the component to accept styles.

This convention can be relaxed when the developer experience is greatly improved by not following these suggestions.

Boolean Props

Boolean props should always default to false, otherwise there's no way for the user to unset it without JavaScript. To keep the API as friendly and consistent as possible, use a name like noHeader with a default value of false instead of header with a default value of true.

A Note About Sass

The Shoelace source is developed using Sass for the convenience of nested selectors, imports, and tedious things such as color palette generation. By design, Sass variables, color functions, and other preprocessor-specific feaures are not used in the source and will not be accepted in a PR.

Consumers of the library should never need to worry about preprocessing the library.

Positioning Popovers

Shoelace uses an internal popover utility for dropdowns, tooltips, etc. This is a light abstraction of Popper.js designed to make positioning and transitioning things easy and consistent throughout the library. When possible, use this utility instead of relying on Popper directly. See src/utilities/popover.ts for details.

Host and Base Elements

All components have a host element, which is a reference to the actual <sl-*> elements. Make sure to always set the host element's display property to the appropriate value depending on your needs, as the default is inline per the HTML spec.

:host {
  display: inline-block;
}

Aside from display, avoid setting properties on the host element when possible. The reason for this is that styles applied to the host element are not encapsulated. Instead, create a base element that wraps the internals and style that instead. This convention also makes it easier to use BEM in components.

.sl-example {
  /* This is the base element */
}

.sl-example--primary {
  /* Primary modifier */
}

To expose custom properties for a component, define them in the :host block and use the following syntax for comments so they appear in the generated docs.

/**
 * @param --color: The component's text color.
 * @param --background-color: The component's background color. 
 */
:host {
  --color: white;
  --background-color: tomato;

  display: inline-block;
}

Conditional Slots

When a component relies on the presence of a slot to do something, don't assume the initial state of the component is its permanent state. Users can add and remove slotted content anytime, and components should be aware of this.

• Create an updateSlots method that uses hasSlot (imported from src/utilities/slot.ts) to check for the required slot(s)
• Listen on the host element for the slotchange event and run updateSlots
• Don't conditionally render any slots — always use hidden or display: none so the slot exists in the DOM

See the source of card, dialog, or drawer for examples.