Contributing to Lutris

Finding issues to work on

If you are looking for issues to work on, have a look at the milestones and see which one is the closest to release then look at the tickets targeted at this release.

If you are less experienced with code, you can also have a look at the issues that are not part of a release which usually include problems with specific games or runners.

Don't forget that lutris is not only a desktop client, there are also a lot of issues to work on on the website and also in the build scripts repository where you can submit bash scripts for various open source games and engines we do not already have.

Other areas can benefit non technical help. The Lutris UI is far from being perfect and could use the input of people experienced with UX and design. Also, while not fully ready, we do appreciate receiving translations for other languages. Support for i18n will come in a future update.

Another area where users can help is confirming some issues that can't be reproduced on the developers setup. Other issues, tagged need help might be a bit more technical to resolve but you can always have a look and see if they fit your area of expertise.

Running Lutris from Git

Running Lutris from a local git repository is easy, it only requires cloning the repository and executing Lutris from there.

git clone https://github.com/lutris/lutris
cd lutris
./bin/lutris -d

Make sure you have all necessary dependencies installed. It is recommended that you keep a stable copy of the client installed with your package manager to ensure that all dependencies are available. If you are working on a branch implementing new features, such as the next branch, it might introduce new dependencies. Check in the package configuration files for new dependencies, for example Debian based distros will have their dependencies listed in debian/control and in lutris.spec for RPM based ones.

Under NO circumstances should you use a virtualenv or install dependencies with pip. The PyGOject introspection libraries are not regular python packages and it is not possible to pip install them or use them from a virtualenv. Make sure to always use PyGOject from your distribution's package manager.

Formatting your code

To ensure getting your contributions getting merged faster and to avoid other developers from going back and fixing your code, please make your code pass the pylint checks. We highly recommend that you install a pylint plugin for your code editor. Once you have pylint set up to check the code, you can configure it to use 120 characters max per line instead of 80.

You can help fixing formatting issues or other code smells by having a look at the CodeFactor page: https://www.codefactor.io/repository/github/lutris/lutris

When writing docstrings, you should follow the Google style (See: https://sphinxcontrib-napoleon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/example_google.html)

Do not add type annotations, those are not supported in Python 3.4.

Writing tests

If your patch does not require interactions with a GUI or external processes, please consider adding unit tests for your code. Have a look at the existing test suite in the tests folder to see what kind of features are tested.

Running tests

Be sure to test your changes thoroughly, never submit changes without running the code. At the very least, run the test suite and check that nothing broke. You can run the test suite by typing make test in the source directory. In order to run the test, you'll need to install nosetests and flake8:

pip3 install nose flake8

Submitting your changes

Make a new git branch based of master in most cases, or next if you want to target a future release. Send a pull request through Github describing what issue the patch solves. If the PR is related to and existing bug report, you can add (Closes #nnn) or (Fixes #nnn) to your PR title or message, where nnn is the ticket number you're fixing. If you have been fixing your PR with several commits, please consider squashing those commits into one with git rebase -i.

Developer resources

Lutris uses Python 3 and GObject / Gtk+ 3 as its core stack, here are some links to some resources that can help you familiarize yourself with the project's code base.

Project structure

[root]-+ Config files and READMEs
    |
    +-[bin] Main lutris executable script
    +-[debian] Debian / Ubuntu packaging configuration
    +-[docs] User documentation
    +-[lutris]-+ Source folder
    |          |
    |          +-[gui] Gtk UI code
    |          +-[installer] Install script interpreter
    |          +-[migrations] Migration scripts for user side changes
    |          +-[runners] Runner code, detailing launch options and settings
    |          +-[services] External services (Steam, GOG, ...)
    |          +-[util] Generic utilities
    |
    +-[po] Translation files
    +-[share] Lutris resources like icons, ui files, scripts
    +-[tests] Unit tests

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