pulsar/docs/contributing-to-packages.md

Contributing to Official Atom Packages

If you think you know which package is causing the issue you are reporting, feel free to open up the issue in that specific repository instead. When in doubt just open the issue here but be aware that it may get closed here and reopened in the proper package's repository.

Hacking on Packages

Cloning

The first step is creating your own clone. You can of course do this manually with git, or you can use the apm develop command to create a clone based on the package's repository field in the package.json.

For example, if you want to make changes to the tree-view package, run the following command:

> apm develop tree-view
Cloning https://github.com/atom/tree-view ✓
Installing modules ✓
~/.atom/dev/packages/tree-view -> ~/github/tree-view

This clones the tree-view repository to ~/github. If you prefer a different path, specify it via the ATOM_REPOS_HOME environment variable.

Running in Development Mode

Editing a package in Atom is a bit of a circular experience: you're using Atom to modify itself. What happens if you temporarily break something? You don't want the version of Atom you're using to edit to become useless in the process. For this reason, you'll only want to load packages in development mode while you are working on them. You'll perform your editing in stable mode, only switching to development mode to test your changes.

To open a development mode window, use the "Application: Open Dev" command, which is normally bound to cmd-shift-o. You can also run dev mode from the command line with atom --dev.

To load your package in development mode, create a symlink to it in ~/.atom/dev/packages. This occurs automatically when you clone the package with apm develop. You can also run apm link --dev and apm unlink --dev from the package directory to create and remove dev-mode symlinks.

Installing Dependencies

Finally, you need to install the cloned package's dependencies by running apm install within the package directory. This step is also performed automatically the first time you run apm develop, but you'll want to keep dependencies up to date by running apm update after pulling upstream changes.