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How to become a Core Contributor using Docker

If you’re reading this, thank you! This means you’re interested in contributing to PrestaShop. You probably are a PrestaShop developer, and your use of the project is slightly different from ours. For instance, there are few differences between PrestaShop 1.7 (the release) and the branch 1.7 of PrestaShop in the GitHub repository. This is because we create a release usable by everyone from our sources.

To be able to contribute you need:

  • a GitHub account
  • to know the basics of git
  • to be able to run prestashop from the sources

In this part, we’ll run PrestaShop using docker.

No need to “know” docker, but you should have the “docker” command available in your terminal.

If you need to install “docker”, you can follow their Documentation.

Install PrestaShop Core

To install the core, you need to fork the PrestaShop repository. A fork is a copy of the original project on GitHub. If you don’t know what is a fork or how to fork a project on GitHub, you can follow the GitHub tutorial.

Once you have forked the project, you need to download it to your computer.

For instance, if your GitHub nickname is preston, this is what you should do in your terminal:

git clone https://github.com/preston/PrestaShop.git
Of course, you need to replace “preston” with your own nickname here.

Then you can start the effective installation:

cd PrestaShop
docker-compose up
The installation can take between 10-15 minutes, don’t close the terminal!

You’ll see a lot of information displayed in your terminal, you should spot the following ones:

prestashop-git | \n* Installing PrestaShop, this may take a while ...
prestashop-git | -- Installation successful! --
prestashop-git | \n* Almost ! Starting web server now\n

At this point, your PrestaShop installation is ready and the website is available at http://localhost:8001.

The default credentials for the back-office are [email protected] / prestashop_demo.

Default MySQL credentials to connect using 3rd party programs like Sequel Pro and others: Username: root Password: prestashop

You can check MySQL port using command line

docker-compose ps mysql
You can now close the terminal if you want.

Make your first contribution

The very first step to create a pull request is to create your own git branch.

Let’s say you want to suggest a new feature, like emoticon support everywhere. A correct name for your git branch could be “add-emoticons-support”:

git checkout -b "add-emoticons-support"

Then you can start to do changes on PrestaShop Core, and create commits: YaY!

A good practice is to write meaningful commits messages: it’s better to have “corrected type hinting in FooBar” than “fixed stuff”.

Launch the test suite

Your changes now sounds ok, and you’re almost ready to share your changes with the community. Before all, you may ensure your changes don’t break everything: this is why we have multiple test suites you can use. Want to read more about tests in PrestaShop? Head to this page.

You can execute it in your dockerized PrestaShop application without altering your website (it uses a specific database).

docker exec prestashop_prestashop-git_1 composer test-all

Publish your work

See Submit a Pull Request.