Be the first to help test new features/improvements and provide feedback! Regular `:unstable` builds are available for early access. These are for the tinkerers and the brave. Ideally, use a testing environment first, before upgrading your main installation.
There is always something that can get missed during development. Look at the commit messages tagged with `#build` - these are the unstable builds and give a quick overview of what has changed.
Then provide feedback - even if you don't encounter any issues! You can do this in the `#beta-testing` channel on the [Discord](https://tubearchivist.com/discord) Discord server.
- Do provide details and context, this matters a lot and makes it easier for people to help.
- Do familiarize yourself with the project first, some questions answer themselves when using the project for some time. Familiarize yourself with the [Readme](https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist) and the [documentation](https://docs.tubearchivist.com/), this covers a lot of the common questions, particularly the [FAQ](https://docs.tubearchivist.com/faq/).
- Do respond to questions within a day or two so issues can progress. If the issue doesn't move forward due to a lack of response, we'll assume it's solved and we'll close it after some time to keep the list fresh.
- Don't open *duplicates*, that includes open and closed issues.
- Don't open an issue for something that's already on the [roadmap](https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist#roadmap), this needs your help to implement it, not another issue.
- Don't open an issue for something that's a [known limitation](https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist#known-limitations). These are *known* by definition and don't need another reminder. Some limitations may be solved in the future, maybe by you?
- Don't overwrite the *issue template*, they are there for a reason. Overwriting that shows that you don't really care about this project. It shows that you have a misunderstanding how open source collaboration works and just want to push your ideas through. Overwriting the template may result in a ban.
### Bug Report
Bug reports are highly welcome! This project has improved a lot due to your help by providing feedback when something doesn't work as expected. The developers can't possibly cover all edge cases in an ever changing environment like YouTube and yt-dlp.
Please keep in mind:
- Docker logs are the easiest way to understand what's happening when something goes wrong, *always* provide the logs upfront.
- Set the environment variable `DJANGO_DEBUG=True` to Tube Archivist and reproduce the bug for a better log output. Don't forget to remove that variable again after.
- A bug that can't be reproduced, is difficult or sometimes even impossible to fix. Provide very clear steps *how to reproduce*.
This project doesn't take any new feature requests. This project doesn't lack ideas, see the currently open tasks and roadmap. New feature requests aren't helpful at this point in time. Thank you for your understanding.
GitHub is most likely not the best place to ask for installation help. That's inherently individual and one on one.
1. First step is always, help yourself. Start at the [Readme](https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist) or the additional platform specific installation pages in the [docs](https://docs.tubearchivist.com/).
2. If that doesn't answer your question, open a `#support` thread on [Discord](https://www.tubearchivist.com/discord).
3. Only if that is not an option, open an issue here.
IMPORTANT: When receiving help, contribute back to the community by improving the installation instructions with your newly gained knowledge.
Thank you for contributing and helping improve this project. Focus for the foreseeable future is on improving and building on existing functionality, *not* on adding and expanding the application.
- For **code changes**, make your PR against the [testing branch](https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist/tree/testing). That's where all active development happens. This simplifies the later merging into *master*, minimizes any conflicts and usually allows for easy and convenient *fast-forward* merging.
- Show off your progress, even if not yet complete, by creating a [draft](https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-pull-requests/proposing-changes-to-your-work-with-pull-requests/about-pull-requests#draft-pull-requests) PR first and switch it as *ready* when you are ready.
- Make sure all your code is linted and formatted correctly, see below.
### Documentation Changes
All documentation is intended to represent the state of the [latest](https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist/releases/latest) release.
- If your PR with code changes also requires changes to documentation *.md files here in this repo, create a separate PR for that, so it can be merged separately at release.
- You can make the PR directly against the *master* branch.
- If your PR requires changes on the [tubearchivist/docs](https://github.com/tubearchivist/docs), make the PR over there.
- Prepare your documentation updates at the same time as the code changes, so people testing your PR can consult the prepared docs if needed.
This project uses the excellent [pre-commit](https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit) library. The [pre-commit-config.yml](https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist/blob/master/.pre-commit-config.yaml) file is part of this repo.
- On first run, this will download and install the needed environments to your local machine, that can take some time. But that will be reused on sunsequent commits.
As you have read the [FAQ](https://docs.tubearchivist.com/faq/) and the [known limitations](https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist#known-limitations) and have gotten an idea what this project tries to do, there will be some obvious shortcomings that stand out, that have been explicitly excluded from the scope of this project, at least for the time being.
Extending the scope of this project will only be feasible with more [regular contributors](https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist/graphs/contributors) that are willing to help improve this project in the long run. Contributors that have an overall improvement of the project in mind and not just about implementing this *one* thing.
Small minor additions, or making a PR for a documented feature request or bug, even if that was and will be your only contribution to this project, are always welcome and is *not* what this is about.
Beyond that, general rules to consider:
- Maintainability is key: It's not just about implementing something and being done with it, it's about maintaining it, fixing bugs as they occur, improving on it and supporting it in the long run.
- Others can do it better: Some problems have been solved by very talented developers. These things don't need to be reinvented again here in this project.
- Develop for the 80%: New features and additions *should* be beneficial for 80% of the users. If you are trying to solve your own problem that only applies to you, maybe that would be better to do in your own fork or if possible by a standalone implementation using the API.
- If all of that sounds too strict for you, as stated above, start becoming a regular contributor to this project.
Some of you might have created useful scripts or API integrations around this project. Sharing is caring! Please add a link to your script to the Readme [here](https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist#user-scripts).
- Your repo should have a `LICENSE` file with one of the common open source licenses. People are expected to fork, adapt and build upon your great work.
- Your script should not modify the *official* files of Tube Archivist. E.g. your symlink script should build links *outside* of your `/youtube` folder. Or your fancy script that creates a beautiful artwork gallery should do that *outside* of the `/cache` folder. Modifying the *official* files and folders of TA are probably not supported.
- On the top of the repo you should have a mention and a link back to the Tube Archivist repo. Clearly state to **not** to open any issues on the main TA repo regarding your script.
- Example template:
-`[<user>/<repo>](https://linktoyourrepo.com)`: A short one line description.
The documentation available at [docs.tubearchivist.com](https://docs.tubearchivist.com/) and is build from a separate repo [tubearchivist/docs](https://github.com/tubearchivist/docs). The Readme there has additional instructions on how to make changes.
This codebase is set up to be developed natively outside of docker as well as in a docker container. Developing outside of a docker container can be convenient, as IDE and hot reload usually works out of the box. But testing inside of a container is still essential, as there are subtle differences, especially when working with the filesystem and networking between containers.
- Subtitles currently fail to load with `DJANGO_DEBUG=True`, that is due to incorrect `Content-Type` error set by Django's static file implementation. That's only if you run the Django dev server, Nginx sets the correct headers.
Set up your virtual environment and install the requirements defined in `requirements-dev.txt`.
There are options built in to load environment variables from a file using `load_dotenv`. Example `.env` file to place in the same folder as `manage.py`:
Then look at the container startup script `run.sh`, make sure all needed migrations and startup checks ran. To start the dev backend server from the same folder as `manage.py` run:
Functional changes should be made against the unstable `testing` branch, so check that branch out, then make a new branch for your work.
Edit the `docker-compose.yml` file and replace the [`image: bbilly1/tubearchivist` line](https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist/blob/4af12aee15620e330adf3624c984c3acf6d0ac8b/docker-compose.yml#L7) with `build: .`. Also make any other changes to the environment variables and so on necessary to run the application, just like you're launching the application as normal.
Run `docker compose up --build`. This will bring up the application. Kill it with `ctrl-c` or by running `docker compose down` from a new terminal window in the same directory.
Make your changes locally and re-run `docker compose up --build`. The `Dockerfile` is structured in a way that the actual application code is in the last layer so rebuilding the image with only code changes utilizes the build cache for everything else and will just take a few seconds.
You may find it nice to run everything inside of a VM for complete environment snapshots and encapsulation, though this is not strictly necessary. There's a `deploy.sh` script which has some helpers for this use case:
- The `test` argument takes another optional argument to build for a specific architecture valid options are: `amd64`, `arm64` and `multi`, default is `amd64`.
- This `deploy.sh` script is not meant to be universally usable for every possible environment but could serve as an idea on how to automatically rebuild containers to test changes - customize to your liking.
Additionally to the required services as listed in the example docker-compose file, the **Dev Tools** of [Kibana](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/docker.html) are invaluable for running and testing Elasticsearch queries.
If you want to run queries on the Elasticsearch container directly from your host with for example `curl` or something like *postman*, you might want to **publish** the port 9200 instead of just **exposing** it.
The token will get stored in ES in the `config` folder, and not in the `data` folder. To persist the token between ES container rebuilds, you'll need to persist the config folder as an additional volume:
