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How to Contribute

So you want to contribute to the project. THIS IS GREAT NEWS! Seriously. We're all pretty happy about this.

Getting set up to contribute

Fork the homebrew-cask repository as per instructions in the GitHub help pages:

Fork the repository in GitHub with the 'Fork' button
Add your GitHub fork as a remote for your homebrew-cask Tap

github_user='<my-github-username>'
cd $(brew --prefix)/Library/Taps/phinze-cask
git remote add $github_user https://github.com/$github_user/homebrew-cask

Adding a Cask

Making a Cask is easy: a Cask is a Ruby file that is only eight lines long. Here's a Cask for Alfred.app as an example:

class Alfred < Cask
  url 'http://cachefly.alfredapp.com/alfred_1.3.2_265.zip'
  homepage 'http://www.alfredapp.com/'
  version '1.3.2_265'
  sha1 'e10f15a0ae758cae2a22557f14890fa5989260ce'
  link :app, 'Alfred.app'
end

To get started, use the handy dandy brew cask create command.

brew cask create my-new-cask

This will open $EDITOR with a template for your new cask. Note that the convention is that hyphens in the name indicate casing in the class name, so the Cask name 'my-new-cask' becomes MyNewCask stored in my-new-cask.rb. So running the above command will get you a template that looks like this:

class MyNewCask < Cask
  url ''
  homepage ''
  version ''
  sha1 ''
  link :app, ''
end

Fill in the following fields for your Cask:

field	explanation
`url`	URL to the `.dmg`/`.zip`/`.tgz` file that contains the application
`homepage`	application homepage;used for the `brew cask home` command
`version`	application version; determines the directory structure in the Caskroom
`sha1`	SHA-1 Checksum of the file; checked when the file is downloaded to prevent any funny business
`link`	indicate which file(s) should be linked into the `Applications` folder on installation

Good Things to Know

In order to find out the checksum for the file, the easiest way is to leave it blank and attempt installation. The checksum will fail and tell you what the real sha1 should be.
You can specify link :app, :none if no files should be linked
If the application does not have versioned downloads, you can skip the checksum by specifying no_checksum, which takes no arguments
We have some conventions for projects without version-specific URLs. latest is a common version for those, but you can grep through the existing casks for other examples

Testing your new Cask

Give it a shot with brew cask install my-new-cask

Did it install? If something went wrong, brew cask uninstall my-new-cask and edit your Cask to fix it.

If everything looks good, you'll also want to make sure you cask passes audit with brew cask audit my-new-cask

If your application and homebrew-cask do not work well together, feel free to file an issue after checking out open issues.

Submitting your Changes

Hop into your Tap and check to make sure your new cask is there:

cd $(brew --prefix)/Library/Taps/phinze-cask
git status
# On branch master
# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
#       Casks/my-new-cask.rb

So far, so good. Now make a feature branch that you'll use in your pull request:

git checkout -b my-new-cask
Switched to a new branch 'my-new-cask'

Stage your Cask with git add Casks/my-new-cask.rb. You can view the changes that are to be committed with git diff --cached.

Commit your changes with git commit -v. Write your commit message with:

the first line being commit summary, 50 characters or less,
followed by an empty line
and an explanation of the commit, wrapped to 72 characters.

See a note about git commit messages for a more thorough explanation.

Push your changes to your GitHub account:

github_user='<my-github-username>'
git push $github_user my-new-cask

Filing a pull request on GitHub

Now go to your GitHub repository at https://github.com/my-github-username/homebrew-cask, switch branch to your topic branch and click on 'Pull Request' button. You can then add further comments to your pull request.

Congratulations! You are done now, and your Cask should be pulled in or otherwise noticed in a while.

Cleaning up

After your Pull Request is away, you might want to get yourself back on master, so that brew update will pull down new Casks properly.

cd $(brew --prefix)/Library/Taps/phinze-cask
git checkout master

Neat and tidy!

Working on homebrew-cask itself

If you'd like to hack on the ruby code in the project itself, one way to play with changes is to symlink the rubylib folder to your Tap repository. So assuming your fork is cloned at ~/homebrew-cask you could do something like this:

$ cd $(brew --prefix brew-cask)
$ mv rubylib{,.orig}
$ ln -s ~/homebrew-cask/lib rubylib

Now you can hack on ~/homebrew-cask and use the cli to interact with the code.

Mind the test suite!

If you're making changes - please write some tests for them! Also be sure to run the whole test suite before submitting (if you forget Travis-CI will do that for you and embarass you in front of all your friends). :)

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