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Contributing to Boa

Boa welcomes contribution from everyone. Here are the guidelines if you are thinking of helping out:

Contributions​

Contributions to Boa or its dependencies should be made in the form of GitHub pull requests. Each pull request will be reviewed by a core contributor (someone with permission to land patches) and either landed in the main tree or given feedback for changes that would be required. All contributions should follow this format.

Should you wish to work on an issue, please claim it first by commenting on the GitHub issue that you want to work on it. This is to prevent duplicated efforts from contributors on the same issue.

Head over to issues and check for "good first issue" labels to find good tasks to start with. If you come across words or jargon that do not make sense, please ask!

If you don't already have Rust installed rustup is the recommended tool to use. It will install Rust and allow you to switch between nightly, stable and beta. You can also install additional components. In Linux, you can run:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Then simply clone this project and cargo build.

Running the compiler​

You can execute a Boa console by running cargo run, and you can compile a list of JavaScript files by running cargo run -- file1.js file2.js and so on.

Building the docs​

To build the development documentation, run:

cargo doc --all-features --document-private-items --workspace

This will also document all the dependencies on the workspace, which could be heavier in size. To only generate documentation for the workspace members, just add the --no-deps flag:

cargo doc --all-features --document-private-items --workspace --no-deps

Debugging​

Knowing how to debug the interpreter should help you resolve problems quite quickly. See Debugging.

IDE Setup​

You can work on Boa with any text editor capable of editing Rust and Javascript code. An easy way of getting started is to use Visual Studio Code with the Rust Analyzer extension.

AI​

We are usually not against using AI tools. However, their general availability makes it much easier to fill our review capacity with low-effort contributions. Therefore, every contributor must adhere to the following rules:

  • No spamming PRs. This includes the use of AI agents to open multiple PRs in succession.
  • No PRs with massive line changes (5k+) without prior discussion and acknowledgement.
  • All PR authors must be able to explain what their contribution does in detail.

The maintainers reserve the right to closing any PRs that do not follow these rules, and recurrent offenses will result in a global ban from contributing to all Boa-related projects.

Communication​

Most of our communication happens in Matrix, feel free to ask questions in our Boa space.