Unlock thrives on your contributions. We're excited you are here! Whether you are a software developer, a designer, a writer, or a tester, you are welcome.
We are documenting our process to organize and prioritize our work using GitHub's tools.
We also use labels as a way to classify tasks and issues using other dimensions. For example, we use P-0, 1, 2, 3 to identify the priority of a given task of issue.
- P-0: Blocking bugs that we should drop everything to fix.
- P-1: Bugs that must be fixed before the next release.
- P-2: Bugs that should be fixed before the next release, time and resources permitting.
- P-3: Bugs that should be fixed when there's time.
We reach milestones by solving issues based on their priority.
Each code change is submitted as a pull request. Make sure you complete the templates when opening one.
Unlock has multiple projects ongoing whose release cycles are decoupled because they show different characteristics.
We use the traditional web-dev approach to release early and often. This allows for quick iterations and fast progress. Once reviewed and approved, any change is merged into our master branch and immediately (minutes) deployed to our staging environment. Each commit in the master branch should be expected to be deployed in production and should hence be "production-grade".
We also maintain a production branch which is used to deploy to ... production! This branch is also protected and the only way to add commits to it is to go thru a regular pull request process. This pull request has to be approved and manually merged by one of our team members. Once approved and merge the various production web applications are immediately updated.
If needed, we can also deploy specific versions to production. For this is recommended approach is to open a new pull request against the production branch containing only the commits to be deployed since the latest production deploy. One way to do this is to rebase a local production-fix branch against the remote production branch and cherry pick the commits to be deployed from master. After this is a pull request is made and has to be approved by some of our team members. Once approved the updated production branch is immediately deployed.
Both wedlocks (email service) and unlock-protocol-com (static site) are deployed to production from the master branch. They do not have a staging environment.
Smart contracts are on a slow release cycle. We set a goal to deploy them once per quarter. Since each version may introduce breaking tests, their deployment process is slightly more complicated. Once a "stable" version has been reached (key features fully implemented and usable), we publish the ABI as an npm module.
The next step is to add this new ABI npm package to all of the other (web and server if applicable) apps and ensure that they all run with both the old ABI and the new ABI (the smart contract including versioning to make feature detection easier if needed). Fixes are made to the applications if required.
Once all apps are compatible with the new and old ABIs, they are deployed. We then proceed to updating the goerli deployed smart contracts for the staging environment. At that point, we should run an acceptance test suite (TBD). If everything works as expected, we can safely upgrade the main net smart contracts.
Once everything has been upgraded, we can start removing support for the old ABI from the multiple applications.