HowToContribute

This page is a quick HOWTO explaining how to easily contribute patches to Nutch.

Getting the source code

First of all, you need the Nutch source code.
Create a directory in which you want to store the Nutch source code on your local drive,

> cd somewhereOnYourDisk
> mkdir nutch
> cd nutch

then get the source code on your local drive using SVN.

svn checkout http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/lucene/nutch/

Working time

Now it is time to work.
Feel free to modify the source code and add some (very) nice features using your favorite IDE.

But take care about the following points

• All public classes and methods should have informative javadoc.

• Unit tests are encouraged ( http://www.junit.org).

Building a patch

First of all, please perform some minimal non-regression tests by:

• rebuilding the whole Nutch code

• executing the whole unit tests.

Building Nutch

> cd somewhereOnYourDisk/nutch
> ant

After a while, if you see

BUILD SUCCESSFUL

all is ok, but if you see

BUILD FAILED

please, read carefully the errors messages and check your code.

Unit Tests

> cd somewhereOnYourDisk/nutch
> ant test

After a while, if you see

BUILD SUCCESSFUL

all is ok, but if you see

BUILD FAILED

please, read carefully the errors messages and check your code.

Functional Tests

If you are perfectionist you can also perform some functional tests by running Nutch. Please refer to the NutchTutorial

Creating a patch

In order to create a patch, just type:

svn diff > myBeautifulPatch.patch
vi myBeautifulPatch.patch

This will report all modifications done on Nutch sources on your local disk and save them into the myBeautifulPath.patch file. Then edit the patch file in order to check that it includes ONLY the modifications you want to add to the Nutch SVN repository.

Proposing your work

Finally, patches can either be attached to a message sent to nutch-dev mailing list or to a bug report in Jira (my prefered way in order to easily keep trace of contributions. But it is a very personal point of view).