Task 1: Local tools setup

For sporadic contributions

If you're only planning to contribute very sporadically or as a one short contribution, you should use one of the virtual machines (VM) that we make available to quickly get a working development environment. It's usually a great starting point before setting up your own for the long run.

1. Download and import in Virtual Box one of the following VM (archives are compressed using 7zip format, if you don't have any software that support it you can get it on http://www.7-zip.org/download.html)
   • Ubuntu+Eclipse (see documentation for more details)

For longer term contributions

Ok you've decided that you want to contribute to XWiki seriously and not just sporadically. Thus you should set up your development environment in the same way as the XWiki committers do!

In practice you need to:

• Install Git and clone some XWiki repos you want to work on
• Install Maven and build some XWiki module, see task 2 below.
• Install and setup your IDE: Eclipse instructions, IntelliJ IDEA instructions. You can use any other IDE you prefer too.

Task 2: Build XWiki

Just to get the kick of it, let's try to build some modules of XWiki:

1. Navigate to your xwiki-platform folder and run git pull to have the latest sources
2. Navigate to xwiki-platform/xwiki-platform-distribution/xwiki-platform-distribution-flavor/xwiki-platform-distribution-flavor-jetty-hsqldb and build it with mvn clean install
3. Execute XWiki by doing the following:
   1. Navigate to target/ directory and unzip the generated xwiki-platform-distribution-flavor-jetty-hsqldb-<version>.zip file
   2. Navigate inside the unzipped content and run sh start_xwiki.sh
   3. Open your browser and point it to http://localhost:8080. Verify that XWiki initializes and displays the home page

Task 3: Contribute

There are various ways to contribute to XWiki. Pick one that you're interested in.

Code Contribution

We suggest you pick some Onboarding issue from our issue tracker and that you start implementing it.

Please follow our coding standard and practices as much as possible but don't worry if you make mistakes, you'll send a Pull Request and some committer will review it, helping you along the way

You can also find some instructions on the Contributing page.

Make especially sure to follow our JIRA practices and that the code passes the code acceptance criteria.

Task 4: Join the development list

It's generally a good idea to join the developers mailing list where the core committers and contributors talk about the XWiki product (features, APIs, future, events organization, etc.).