How to first contribute to Rails

No more excuses. Here’s an extremely short guide to get you started today.

Requirements

First, if you haven’t forked the Rails project yet, then go to https://github.com/rails/rails and do it now.

Normally, all you need to install are three new dependencies:

brew cask install virtualbox
brew cask install vagrant
vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest

We’ll also use the rails-dev-box, a virtual machine for Ruby on Rails core development. This project automates the setup of a development environment for working on Ruby on Rails itself. We’ll use the virtual machine to create a local environment with everything we need to start hacking and run the test suites.

git clone https://github.com/rails/rails-dev-box.git
cd rails-dev-box 
git clone git@github.com:YOUR_USERNAME/rails.git
git checkout -b YOUR_NEW_BRANCH
vagrant up 

The last command will take a long long time. Be patient, then:

cd rails
code . # or whatever editor of your choice

Now you can explore the codebase, make changes, and write tests.
But in order to run the test suite, you need one last step.

Running tests