Thanks for considering contributing to our repo! We appreciate all contributions to the player, large or small. Please take the time to read through this document before making a contribution to ensure a fun and effective process for everyone involved.
Are you having trouble getting started with JW Player, configuration, or customization? If so, please check the developer docs before submitting an issue here.
As contributors and maintainers of this repo, we'll do our best to help you out as soon as we can - however, we ask you to be respectful of our time. Our team is based in NYC and works in EST time, Monday - Friday.
This guide is focused specifically for developers contributing towards this open-source project. If you pay for JW Player, you're entitled to direct help from our support team here.
We are unable to accept contributions to player translations (in /src/assets/translations) via GitHub. Instead, please go to the feedback form in the translation support article. There you can submit both feedback on existing languages, such as improvements and typos, and request a new language to be supported. We will follow up with your feedback via email.
A bug is a demonstrable problem caused by code in the repository. Bug reports are very helpful! If you think you've found a bug in the player we'd love to know about it (and fix it).
Before submitting an issue, please do your best to confirm that your issue is reproducible and a problem with our player by running through this checklist. Afterwards, if you're still unsure about the cause of your problem, please feel free to submit an issue and we'll do our best to help. For issues building & developing the player, skip this guide and submit a report directly.
- Check the console:
- Are there any network errors (
404
,403
,500
, etc)? - Is there a CORS error (
access-control-allow-origin
)? - Are there errors thrown by third-party code?
- Are there any network errors (
- Check your player:
- Are you using the latest version?
- You can test streams with the latest version here.
- Are you using Flash?
- Ensure you're using the latest version of Flash.
- We're in the process of deprecating Flash and will only fix critical bugs.
- Is your Configuration valid?
- Are you using the latest version?
- Check your browser:
- Are you using a supported browser?
- Are you using the latest version?
- Does the browser support the feature you're trying to use?
- Do we implement the feature you're using?
- For example, we use native HLS playback where available (Safari, Edge, Mobile).
- Check your OS (Mobile):
- Are you using a supported device?
- Are you running the latest version?
- Check your code:
- Are you using a supported media type?
- Are you using the API correctly?
- Check through our issues and make sure your's isn't already reported or resolved.
Great! Please create an issue and follow the guidelines as best as you can - each ask gives us information necessary to solve your problem. If submitting a playback issue, make sure we can access your video at all times. If live, ensure that you provide us with the failing segments. And if you're able to, please isolate your issue by creating a standalone test page.
<html>
<head>
<script src='LINK_TO_YOUR_PLAYER'></script>
<script>jwplayer.key='YOUR_KEY';</script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="player">Loading the player...</div>
<script>
var player = jwplayer('player').setup({ ... });
</script>
</body>
</html>
Pull requests are a great way to help out and improve JW Player. Before embarking on a large PR, please ask us first - we may not need your changes in the repo and don't want you to waste your energy.
While open-source is in the DNA of JW Player, due to our growth as a business, changes to the jwplayer
repository affect millions of video consumers every day. As a result, our governance of this repository needs to reflect that reality.
In the repository's current state certain changes are not compatible with our responsibility to both developers and our customers. Each change requires, at a minimum, product review and QA resource to test that it does not impact anything unexpectedly. Given we have our own roadmap and changes in the pipeline, divying out resources to check larger external changes is not something that's possible at this point in time. That said, there are certain types of contributions that we are more than happy to review and integrate.
- Bugfixes
- Typos/Clarity improvements
- Enhancement suggestions
If you've never contributed before, don't worry - we'll do the best we can to help you throughout the process. Unsure of where to begin? Check out our beginner bugs, or refer to the Questions/Discussions section and drop us a line.
While far from comprehensive, following these guidelines will get the easy stuff out of the way and speed the process along. In addition, please include a good description of what you've changed and why you've changed it.
- Bugfixes:
bugfix/your-branch
- Hotfixes:
hotfix/your-branch
- Code written must work across all supported browsers and devices without transpilation - Chrome, FF, Safari, Edge, and IE 9-11
- Usually this means writing in pure ES5, but ES6 features are allowed if they work everywhere
- Ensure that your code follows our styleguide by passing our ESLint rules
- Ensure that your code passes static analysis by running Flow
- Do your best to match our naming conventions and conform to the style of the code around you
- If you have a large or messy commit history, please rebase & squash your commit history
- Ensure that all existing tests pass
- We don't demand 100% coverage, but please write tests that cover at least the happy paths
- Some code is hard to test or untestable - we won't hold it against you if you're working in a particularly difficult area. Just let us know if you've had some trouble
- If your changes cannot be automated, include a manual test page that demonstrates the functionality of your changes
- Do your best to keep your PRs as small and focused as possible
- If your PR is large, consider breaking it into smaller ones
- Large additions to the code base must be justified - we strive to keep the player as small as possible
- Additions to
package.json
must be backed by good reasons
Feature requests are also welcome, but may not fit within the scope of the player. It's up to you to make the case for your feature and convince us that it's worth implementing. We encourage you to try and solve your problem using the API or Configuration first. As always, you're free to fork the player and implement what you want - feel free to ask questions by following our Questions/Discussions guidelines.
Feature suggestions are initially tracked as GitHub issues. Once any questions have been resolved, it is marked as answered
and subsequently transferred to our internal backlog. Any additional updates to the request will be communicated via the initial issue and the issue may be reopened as needed. Please use the bullets below to format and guide your submission.
- Title Use a clear and descriptive title for the issue to identify the suggestion.
- Problem Describe the problem you're trying to solve. Include the business goals driving this need. Explain why this feature would be useful to other JW Player users and isn't something that can or should be implemented in a fork or using the API. Please provide as much information as possible, as this is the most important section.
- Current solutions/workarounds How would you solve these problems today, even partially? What have you already tried? You can also talk list some other video players or applications where this feature already exists.
- Proposed solutions (optional) Feel free to make a specific suggestion of how you'd solve the problem. We love hearing suggestions, though we may not implement them literally.
- Resources Links/additional materials section. Do you have any research on this ask? Can you point us to any relevant documentation or articles that will help us understand your request?
We love to answer questions and talk with developers! Feel free to ask questions via gitter, the video-dev-slack, or by creating an issue . And if you're in the NYC area, you can come and meet us and other video devs in the flesh at the Video Tech NYC Meetup.
This section lists the labels we use to help us track and manage issues and pull requests. Please open an issue on jwplayer/jwplayer
if you have suggestions for new labels.
Label name | Description |
---|---|
stale |
Issues without activity in an abnormally long time or ones where the creator has not responded to the latest comment from a JW representative in 2 weeks time. Automatically closed in 1 week from label addition. |
invalid |
Issues that are opened that are not related to the open-source repository and would be better serviced by our support staff. Automatically closed after label addition. |
answered |
Issues deemed answered/completed by a JW representative. Automatically closed in 1 week from label addition. |
bug |
Confirmed bugs or reports that are very likely to be bugs. |
feature-request |
Feature requests. |
question |
Questions more than bug reports or feature requests (e.g. how do I do X). |
Parts of this Code of Conduct have been adapted from the contribution guidelines found in the atom/atom repository