Conventions

This is a collection of tips and conventions to follow when working on the ownCloud web frontend. Since it is a living document, please open a PR if you find something missing.

Everyone is invited to contribute. Simply fork the codebase, check the issues for a suitable one and open a pull request!

To make sure your pull request can be efficiently reviewed and won’t need a lot of changes down the road, please run the linter and the unit tests via pnpm lint --fix and pnpm test:unit locally. Our CI will run on pull requests and report back any problems after that. For a further introduction on how we handle testing, please head to the testing docs.

In our project, we follow SemVer and keep a changelog for every change that influences the user experience (where “users” can be admins, end-users and developers). Some changes, like refactoring, updating dependencies, writing documentation or adding tests don’t require a changelog item.

Please add a changelog item to the changelog/unreleased/ folder, referencing the issue and pull request numbers, following the changelog item template.

We’re trying to stick with early returns in our code to make it more performant and simpler to reason about it.

Use the v-text directive in combination with $gettext (or a variation of it) inside HTML tags (instead of a <translate tag="h1"> or similar) in order to make reasoning about the DOM tree easier.

We’re using TypeScript, which allows us to catch bugs at transpile time. Clean types make sure our IDEs can support us in reasoning about our (ever growing, complex) codebase.

We’ve migrated from Vue 2 to Vue 3 late in 2022 and since then have been investing continuous efforts to move away from the Vue options API in favor of the Vue composition API. The web-pkg helper package provides quite some composables which will help you in app & extension development, so we encourage you to make use of the Vue composition API as well, even outside of the ownCloud Web repository.

To keep the bundle size small and reduce the risk of introducing security problems for our users, we try to limit the amount of dependencies in our code base and keep them as up-to-date as possible.