The Lovely Dashboard is an open source project, based on the very popular SimHub Dash.
As such, anyone who wants to contribute, can do so by follwoing the instructions below.
SimHub exports the code in a zipped file named {filename}.simhubdash, which is a collection of JSON files and resources. To maintain a properly versioned codebase, I've implemented and require a pre-commit script, that will prettify the JSON files and thus properly track changes to them.
Before you can run hooks, you need to have the pre-commit package manager installed. You can do so by following the instructions on the official pre-commit website, or just install it using the following command:
brew install pre-commit
Homebrew not your thing? Read more on the official pre-commit website.
Once installed, run pre-commit install to set up the git hook scripts
$ pre-commit install
pre-commit installed at .git/hooks/pre-commit
You're all set as far as tooling is concerned. Every time you make a commit, the pre-commit script will make sure the files are properly formatted and are prettified.
It's usually a good idea to run the hooks against all of the files when adding new hooks (usually pre-commit will only run on the changed files during git hooks). Running pre-commit run --all-files will have a pass at everythig, and if all is well, you should see somthing like the below.
$ pre-commit run --all-files
check json...............................................................Passed
pretty format json.......................................................Passed
To maintain a versioned repository, you will need to commit ONLY the source files of the dashboard which can be found in the SimHub folder. You can right click on the Dashboard in SimHub and select Open Folder. You should copy all those files into the repository, and let GitHub do it's thing when you commit.
To better review the changes commited, you should also share a pre-recorded SimHub replay demonstrating the events which are affected. This can be shared directly on Discord in the #developers channel.