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Electronic Frontier Foundation

HTTPS Everywhere

HTTPS Everywhere Development

Pointers for developers

  • License: GPL version 3+ (although most of the code is GPL-2 compatible)
  • Source code: Available via Git with git clone https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere.git. You can fork and open pull requests using Github at https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere.
  • Translations: If you would like to help translate HTTPS Everywhere into another language, you can do that through Transifex.
  • Bug tracker: Use the GitHub issue tracker or the Tor Project issue tracker. For the Tor Project issue tracker, you can make an account or use the anonymous one "cypherpunks"/"writecode". You won't see replies unless you put an email address in the CC field. Bugs that are caused by rulesets should be tagged "httpse-ruleset-bug", and can be viewed in this report.
  • Mailing lists: The https-everywhere list (archives) is for discussing the project as a whole; the https-everywhere-rules mailing list (archives) is for discussing the rulesets and their contents, including patches and git pull requests.
  • IRC: #https-everywhere on irc.oftc.net. If you ask a question, be sure to stay in the channel someone may reply a few hours or a few days later.

Testing and contributing changes to the source code

HTTPS Everywhere consists of a large number of rules for switching sites from HTTP to HTTPS. You can read more about how to write these rules here.

If you want to create new rules to submit to us, we expect them to be in the src/chrome/content/rules directory. That directory also contains a useful script, make-trivial-rule, to create a simple rule for a specified domain. There is also a script called trivial-validate.py, to check all the pending rules for several common errors and oversights. For example, if you wanted to make a rule for the example.com domain, you could run

bash ./make-trivial-rule example.com

inside the rules directory. This would create Example.com.xml, which you could then take a look at and edit based on your knowledge of any specific URLs at example.com that do or don't work in HTTPS.

Before submitting your change, you should test it in Firefox and/or Chrome, as applicable. You can build the latest version of the extension and run it in a standalone Firefox profile using:

bash ./test.sh --justrun

Similarly, to build and run in a standalone Chromium profile, run:

bash ./run-chromium.sh

You should thoroughly test your changes on the target site: Navigate to as wide a variety of pages as you can find. Try to comment or log in if applicable. Make sure everything still works properly.

After running your manual tests, run the automated tests and the fetch tests:

bash ./test.sh

bash ./fetch-test.sh

This will catch some of the most common types of errors, but is not a guaranteed of correctness.

Once you've tested your changes, you can submit them for review via any of the following:

A quick HOWTO on working with Git

You may want to also look at the Git Reference, GitHub Help Site and the Tor Project's Git documentation to fill in the gaps here, but the below should be enough to get the basics of the workflow down.

First, tell git your name:

git config --global user.name "Your Name"   git config --global user.email "you@example.com"

Then, get a copy of the 'origin' repository:

git clone https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere.git
cd https-everywhere

Alternatively, if you already have a Github account, you can create a "fork" of the repository on Github at https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere. See this page for a tutorial.

Once you have a local copy of the repository, create a new branch for your changes and check it out:

git checkout -b my-new-rules master

When you want to send us your work, you'll need to add any new files to the index with git add:

git add ./src/chrome/content/rules/MyRule1.xml
git add ./src/chrome/content/rules/MyRule2.xml

You can now commit your changes to the local branch. To make things easier, you should commit each xml file individually:

git commit ./src/chrome/content/rules/MyRule1.xml
git commit ./src/chrome/content/rules/MyRule2.xml

Now, you need a place to publish your changes. You can create a github account here: https://github.com/join. https://help.github.com/ describes the account creation process and some other github-specific things.

Once you have created your account and added your remote in your local checkout, you want to push your branch to your github remote:

git push github my-new-rules:my-new-rules

Periodically, you should re-fetch the master repository:

git pull master
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