Liferay is developed by its community consisting of Liferay users, enthusiasts, employees, customers, partners, and others. We strongly encourage you to contribute to Liferay's open source projects by implementing new features, enhancing existing features, and fixing bugs. We also welcome your participation in our forums, writing documentation, and translating existing documentation.
Liferay is known for its innovative top quality features. To maintain this reputation, all code changes are reviewed by a core set of Liferay project maintainers. We encourage you to introduce yourself to the core maintainer(s) and engage them as you contribute to the areas they maintain.
As you have ideas for features you want to implement, follow the contribution steps outlined in the sections, below. For more details on specific steps, and to get a deeper understanding of Liferay in general, make sure to read Liferay's official documentation on the Liferay Developer Network, for using and deploying Liferay Portal, and developing on Liferay. This documentation contains extensive explanations, examples, and reference material for you to consult time and time again.
Also, check out Liferay's extensive Wiki, including its articles on Understanding and Improving Liferay. Lastly, visit the links listed in the Additional Resources section, below.
- Sign up for a JIRA Account to track progress on the feature, improvement, or bug fix you want to implement. We'll refer to these as issues.
- Sign up for a GitHub account to access Liferay's repositories.
- Submit a ticket for your issue, following the
established JIRA
process. If a ticket
already exists for the issue, participate via the existing ticket.
- Describe the issue clearly. If it is a bug, include steps to reproduce it.
- Select an appropriate category for the issue.
- Select the earliest version of the product affected by the issue.
- Fork the repository applicable to your issue. Liferay's core source code resides in the liferay-portal repository. Liferay's plugin source code resides in the liferay-plugins repository.
- Read Contributing to Liferay using Git and Github.
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Ensure you have a working Liferay development environment. For some tips on setting up an efficient workspace, read Optimal Liferay Core Development. This guide provides detailed instructions on how to set up a highly efficient development system with the necessary tools and procedures for optimizing common and repetitive tasks.
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Create a branch from an existing branch (typically the master branch) from which you want to base your changes.
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Commit logical units of work.
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Follow the Liferay Development Style. If you are using Liferay IDE, use the built-in code formatter accessible via the Java → Code Style → Formatter → Active Profile menu.
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Include a reference to your ticket (e.g. LPS-XXXXX) in your commit messages. For example:
LPS-83432 Make the example in CONTRIBUTING imperative and concrete
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Test your changes thoroughly! Consider the wide variety of operating systems, databases, application servers, and other related technologies Liferay supports. Make sure your changes in one environment don't break something in another environment. See Unit and Integration Tests for details on executing Liferay's automated tests.
- Push changes in your branch to your fork.
- Send a pull request to the core maintainer of the area to which your changes apply. You can use github.com to initiate the pull request, or you can use git-pull-request, a command line tool for issuing pull requests, developed specifically for the Liferay Community.
- In the LPS ticket, provide a link to your GitHub pull request and respond to the Contributor License Agreement displayed by clicking the Contribute Solution button.
- You're done! Well, not quite ... be sure to respond to comments and questions to your pull request until it is closed.
- Getting Started as a Liferay Developer
- Optimal Liferay Core Development
- Liferay and JIRA
- Contribute to Liferay on Github
- Liferay Core Development Guidelines
- Setting up and using Liferay IDE
- Contributor License Agreement
- General GitHub documentation
- GitHub pull request documentation
- Liferay's IRC channel on freenode.org