Thank you for being interested in CodeCharta. You should first familiarize yourself with the quick-start guide, and the difference between analysis and the visualization. Afterwards it makes sense to check the architecture decision records (ADR) to get up to speed with the decisions we have made so far. It’s also important to know that CodeCharta uses two different tech stacks for analysis and visualization.

Finally, it would be great if you looked at how we give and receive feedback and after finishing this entire post, please explore our developer guides.

Branching / Releasing

We create Pull Requests to the main branch after implementing a feature or fixing a bug. There is no release or development branch. We never push on main directly. Please take a look at our contributing guidelines before you start committing. When updating your branch, we prefer using a rebase instead of merging to keep the commit history clean.

Code Style Guide

Besides the rules enforced by our linter, we generally do not follow a set of defined style guidelines for our code. For the analysis there is an XML file containing a few style rules for your IDE, you can find out more about that in the analysis readme.

GitHub Actions

In GitHub Actions, we defined stages, which group different jobs. Inside a stage, all jobs run in parallel. There is no data persistence between stages, so we have to rebuild our application in each stage. The CI consists of the following stages:

  • Testing (which runs on every push on an active PR)
  • Sonar Analysis (which runs on every push on an active PR after testing to ensure code quality metrics are met)
  • Deploy (run by make_release.py)

All workflow files can be found under .github/workflows

Testing

  • Runs Unit and E2E/UI-Tests
  • Workflow: test.yml

Sonar

  • Publishes Sonar-Analysis-Results to Sonarcloud.io and displays code-quality of the current PR
  • Workflow: test.yml

Deploy

  • Deploys the application in a docker container to the github-pages
  • Publishes the new version on npm

  • Publishes a docker container on Docker Hub

  • Workflow: release.yml

Common Issues

There are a few issues regularly occurring when trying to start contributing. This aims to be like a FAQ section to help address the most common problems.

General

  1. Error lint-staged: command not found when trying to commit: Try to reinstall the node packages in the project. To do that, visit the root directory of the project (and the subdirectories for analysis and visualization if that still fails) and execute npm ci.

Analysis

  1. First build fails on new setup: One of our parsers depends on MetricGardener which is a multi-language parser to calculate metrics for a variety of languages. Therefore, make sure to install MetricGardener before trying to build the project. Also make sure that metric-gardener is available in your CLI, else npm will try to install it on the fly. You can find more information on the documentation page about the MetricGardenerImporter.

Further documentation

For further information please check out the documentation pages for the analysis and visualization parts of the project.

Updated: