Contributing to This Project

So you'd like to help maintain this template - excellent!

Getting Up and Running

These are things you'll likely only need to do once:

Things you'll need first:
- Node and npm, somewhere to edit code, a terminal you know how to use
- TODO: add links to installation instructions
Fork this repo.
- TODO: add link to basic GitHub instructions
Clone it down.
- TODO: add link to basic GitHub instructions
From the project directory, run npm i to install the project dependencies.
Add a file to the root project directory called .env - copy the contents of .env-example into this file for now; this is where your environment variables will live.
- you can do this manually in whatever your preferred code editor is, or you can do this from the command line like this: cp .env-example .env

Pull in any changes from the upstream repo.
- TODO: add steps and link to docs
Run npm i if there have been changes to the dependencies since the last time you worked on this project. If you're not sure, or you're troubleshooting, it's not going to hurt to run npm i - there may be updates you need.
Run the tests with npm run test - you should be starting with a working project; if you have any failing tests, you may not be set up right. Confirm that you have followed all of the above steps correctly, that you are on a branch that reflects the latest upstream changes, that you are in the project directory, etc.
To be doubly sure things are working, you can run the application with npm run start or npm run start:watch - you should see a message that says 'Started on 7890' (or whatever port you've configured it to run on, if you've changed your .env). You can stop the application with Ctrl+C. The tests should be reliable enough that this step is just for verification, so if you find tests are passing but you can't run the app please open an issue/let me know!
Make a development branch - whether it's a feature or a bugfix or something else, make a new branch off the code that you verified is working. Ideally, make the branch name descriptive of what you're working on, such as feature/authorization-template or bugfix/SSL-errors.