Reviewing Pull Requests

There are a lot of individual components and artifacts that make up Harper. How a patch gets reviewed depends significantly on which component or artifact it affects. This page seeks to document the tooling available for downloading and testing patches on a local machine.

Patches to harper-core

If a patch only affects a grammar rule, it should only be touching harper-core. This means you can test the change using any Harper frontend (of which there are many).

Using GitHub Actions Artifacts

We run builds for a variety of platforms whenever a Pull Request is pushed to. You can use these to review changes to various aspects of Harper, including harper-ls, harper-cli, and the Visual Studio Code plugin.

Testing Using Cargo and harper-cli

Most of our build tooling exists for Harper's various integrations. If you are testing harper-core, you can skip all the fluff and compile the patch using Cargo directly.

cargo install --git https://github.com/automattic/harper --branch <branch-name> <binary-artifact> --locked

For example, for PR #445, we can install the patched version of the harper-cli debug tool with the following command:

cargo install --git https://github.com/automattic/harper --branch somewhat-something harper-cli --locked

From there, you can run the tool on any file with harper-cli lint <path>.

Testing Via the Docker Image

We build our web documentation in a Docker image. This documentation includes a demo, so you can also use this image to review changes to linting rules and other aspects of the core algorithm.

git clone https://github.com/automattic/harper
cd harper
git switch <branch from PR>
IMAGE_HASH=$(docker build . -q)
docker run -p 3000:3000 -it $IMAGE_HASH

From there, open up http://localhost:3000 in your web browser of choice and use the text area to test the change.