How to contribute to the Tribler project?

Checking out the Stabilization Branch

The stabilization branch release-X.Y contains the most up to date bugfixes. If your issue cannot be reproduced there, it is most likely already fixed.

To backup your Tribler installation and checkout the latest version of the stabilization branch, please perform the following steps. * Copy the .Tribler folder to a safe location on your system (for instance the desktop) Make sure to leave the original folder on its original location. This folder is located at ~/.Tribler/ (Linux/OS X) or %APPDATA\.Tribler (Windows). * Remove the tribler installation folder. * Go to the latest tested version of Tribler and under ‘Build Artifacts’, download the package appropriate to your operating system. * Install/unzip this package.

To revert back to your original version of Tribler, download the installer again and install it. Afterwards you can restore your backed up Tribler data folder.

Reporting bugs

  • Make sure the issue/feature you want to report doesn’t already exist.

  • If you want to report more than one bug or feature, create individual issues for each of them.

  • Use a clear descriptive title.

  • Provide at least the following information:
    • The version of Tribler that you are using, if you are running from a branch, branch name and commit ID.

    • The OS and version you are running.

    • Step by step instructions to reproduce the issue in case it’s a bug.

  • Attach Tribler’s log file. On Windows, these are found in %APPDATA%. On Linux distributions, the log file is located in ~/.Tribler/. On OS X, the crash logs can be found in ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports and logger output can be found in the syslog. The location of this log is /var/log/system.log. You can use the following command to extract Tribler-related lines from the syslog: syslog -C |grep -i tribler > ~/tribler.log. Please have a look at the content of the log files before posting it in case you want to edit out something.
    • Does it still happen if you move %APPDATA%\.Tribler away temporarily? (Do not delete it!)

    • Do you have any other software installed that might interfere with Tribler?

Pull requests

When creating a new Pull request, please take note of the following:
  • New features always go to main.

  • Before starting to work on a feature or fix, check that nobody else is working on it by assigning yourself the corresponding issue. Create one if it doesn’t exist. This is also useful to get feedback about if a given feature would be accepted. If you are not a member of the project, just drop a comment saying that you are working on that.

  • Create one PR per feature/bugfix.

  • Provide tests for any new features/fixes you implement and make sure they cover all methods and at least the important branches in the new/updated code. We use the pytest framework, and use fixtures to specify the components enabled in each test by using fixtures. Please do not enable components that are not strictly necessary for the test you are writing (e.g., libtorrent) as they will slow down the duration of test execution.

  • If implementing a reasonably big or experimental feature, make it toggleable if possible (For instance for a new community, new GUI stuff, etc.).

  • When you make a change to the user interface, please attach a screenshot of your changes to the pull request. This helps reviewers since it avoids the need for them to manually checkout your code to see what has been changed.

  • Keep a clean and nice git history:
    • Squash fixup commits together.

    • Have nice and descriptive commit messages.

  • Do not commit extraneous/auto-generated files.

  • Use Unix style newlines for any new file created.

  • No print statements if it’s not really justified (command line tools and such).

  • For more PR etiquette have a look here.

PR policies

Recommendations: