How to contribute

CakePHP loves to welcome your contributions. There are several ways to help out:

There are a few guidelines that we need contributors to follow so that we have a chance of keeping on top of things.

Code of Conduct

Help us keep CakePHP open and inclusive. Please read and follow our Code of Conduct.

Make sure you have a GitHub account.
Submit an issue, assuming one does not already exist.
- Clearly describe the issue including steps to reproduce when it is a bug.
- Make sure you fill in the earliest version that you know has the issue.
Fork the repository on GitHub.

Create a topic branch from where you want to base your work.
- This is usually the master branch.
- Only target release branches if you are certain your fix must be on that branch.
- To quickly create a topic branch based on master; git branch master/my_contribution master then checkout the new branch with git checkout master/my_contribution. Better avoid working directly on the master branch, to avoid conflicts if you pull in updates from origin.
Make commits of logical units.
Check for unnecessary whitespace with git diff --check before committing.
Use descriptive commit messages and reference the #issue number.
Core test cases should continue to pass. You can run tests locally or enable travis-ci for your fork, so all tests and codesniffs will be executed.
Your work should apply the CakePHP coding standards.

Bugfix branches will be based on master.
New features that are backwards compatible will be based on next minor release branch.
New features or other non backwards compatible changes will go in the next major release branch.

Push your changes to a topic branch in your fork of the repository.
Submit a pull request to the repository in the cakephp organization, with the correct target branch.

CakePHP tests requires PHPUnit 3.7, version 4 is not compatible. To run the test cases locally use the following command:

./lib/Cake/Console/cake test core AllTests --stderr

To run the sniffs for CakePHP coding standards:

phpcs -p --extensions=php --standard=CakePHP ./lib/Cake

Check the cakephp-codesniffer repository to setup the CakePHP standard. The README contains installation info for the sniff and phpcs.

If you've found a security related issue in CakePHP, please don't open an issue in GitHub. Instead contact us at security@cakephp.org. For more information on how we handle security issues, see the CakePHP Security Issue Process.