CONTRIBUTING.md

SvelteKit Contributing Guide

Preparing

This is a monorepo, meaning the repo holds multiple packages. It requires the use of pnpm. You can install pnpm with:

npm i -g pnpm

pnpm commands run in the project's root directory will run on all sub-projects. You can checkout the code and install the dependencies with:

git clone git@github.com:sveltejs/kit.git
cd kit
pnpm install

You can now run SvelteKit by linking it into your project with pnpm overrides:

{
  // ...
  "pnpm": {
    "overrides": {
      "@sveltejs/kit": "link:../path/to/svelte-kit/packages/kit",
      // additionally/optional the adapter you're using
      "@sveltejs/adapter-auto": "link:../path/to/svelte-kit/packages/adapter-auto"
    }
  }
}

Code structure

Entry points to be aware of are:

• packages/create-svelte - code that's run when you create a new project with npm create svelte@latest
• packages/package - for the svelte-package command
• packages/kit/src/core - code that's called at dev/build-time
• packages/kit/src/core/sync - for svelte-kit sync, which regenerates routing info and type definitions
• packages/kit/src/runtime - code that's called at runtime
• packages/kit/src/exports/vite - for all the Vite plugin related stuff
• packages/adapter-[platform] - for the various SvelteKit-provided adapters

Good first issues

If you're looking for an issue to tackle to get familiar with the codebase and test suite, the low hanging fruit label contains issues that ought to be relatively straightforward to fix. Check to see if a PR already exists for an issue before working on it!

Issues that have a clear solution but which may be slightly more involved have the ready to implement label.

Issues with the soon milestone are higher priority than issues with the later label (though PRs for 'later' issues are still welcome, especially if you're affected by them).

Testing

Run pnpm test to run the tests from all subpackages. Browser tests live in subdirectories of packages/kit/test such as packages/kit/test/apps/basics.

You can run the tests for only a single package by first moving to that directory. E.g. cd packages/kit.

For some packages you must rebuild each time before running the tests if you've made code changes. These packages have a build command. Packages like packages/kit don't require a build step.

To run a single integration test or otherwise control the running of the tests locally see the Playwright CLI docs. Note that you will need to run these commands from the test project directory such as packages/kit/test/apps/basics.

You can run the test server with cd packages/kit/test/apps/basics; pnpm run dev to hit it with your browser. The Playwright Inspector offers similar functionality.

You may need to install some dependencies first, e.g. with npx playwright install-deps (which only works on Ubuntu).

If there are tests that fail on the CI, you can retrieve the failed screenshots by going to the summary page of the CI run. You can usually find this by clicking on "Details" of the check results, clicking "Summary" at the top-left corner, and then scrolling to the bottom "Artifacts" section to download the archive.

It is very easy to introduce flakiness in a browser test. If you try to fix the flakiness in a test, you can run it until failure to gain some confidence you've fixed the test with a command like:

npx playwright test --workers=1 --repeat-each 1000 --max-failures 1 -g "accepts a Request object"

Working on Vite and other dependencies

If you would like to test local changes to Vite or another dependency, you can build it and then use pnpm.overrides. Please note that pnpm.overrides must be specified in the root package.json and you must first list the package as a dependency in the root package.json:

{
  // ...
  "dependencies": {
    "vite": "^4.0.0"
  },
  "pnpm": {
    "overrides": {
      "vite": "link:../path/to/vite/packages/vite"
    }
  }
}

Documentation changes

All documentation for SvelteKit is in the documentation directory, and any improvements should be made as a Pull Request to this repository. The site itself is located in the sites/kit.svelte.dev directory and can be run locally to preview changes.

Sending PRs

Coding style

There are a few guidelines we follow:

• Internal variables are written with snake_case while external APIs are written with camelCase
• Provide a single object as the argument to public APIs. This object can have multiple properties
• Avoid creating new test projects under packages/kit/test/apps but reuse an existing one when possible
• Ensure pnpm lint and pnpm check pass. You can run pnpm format to format the code

To use the git hooks in the repo, which will save you from waiting for CI to tell you that you forgot to lint, run this:

git config core.hookspath .githooks

Generating changelogs

For changes to be reflected in package changelogs, run pnpm changeset and follow the prompts.

Releases

The Changesets GitHub action will create and update a PR that applies changesets and publishes new versions of changed packages to npm.

New packages will need to be published manually the first time if they are scoped to the @sveltejs organisation, by running this from the package directory:

npm publish --access=public