New contributors

This page is aimed at people who are new to Mozilla and want to contribute to Mozilla source code related to Marionette Python tests, WebDriver spec tests and related test harnesses and tools. Mozilla has both git and Mercurial repositories, but this guide only describes Mercurial.

If you run into issues or have doubts, check out the Resources section below and don’t hesitate to ask questions. :) The goal of these steps is to make sure you have the basics of your development environment working. Once you do, we can get you started with working on an actual bug, yay!

Accounts, communication

  1. Set up a Bugzilla account (and, if you like, a Mozillians profile). Please include your Element nickname in both of these accounts so we can work with you more easily. For example, Eve Smith would set the Bugzilla name to “Eve Smith (:esmith)”, where “esmith” is the Element nick.

  2. For a direct communication with us it will be beneficial to setup Element. Make sure to also register your nickname as described in the linked document.

  3. Join our #webdriver:mozilla.org channel, and introduce yourself to the team. :whimboo, :jdescottes, and :jgraham are all familiar with Marionette. We’re nice, I promise, but we might not answer right away due to different time zones, time off, etc. So please be patient.

  4. When you want to ask a question on Element, just go ahead an ask it even if no one appears to be around/responding. Provide lots of detail so that we have a better chance of helping you. If you don’t get an answer right away, check again in a few hours – someone may have answered you in the mean time.

  5. If you’re having trouble reaching us over Element, you are welcome to send an email to our mailing list instead. It’s a good idea to include your Element nick in your email message.

Getting the code, running tests

Follow the documentation on Contributing to get a sense of our projects, and which is of most interest for you. You will also learn how to get the Firefox source code, build your custom Firefox build, and how to run the tests.

Work on bugs and get code review

Once you are familiar with the code of the test harnesses, and the tests you might want to start with your first contribution. The necessary steps to submit and verify your patches are laid out in Patches.

Resources