Overview

CLAHub provides a low-friction way to have a Contributor License Agreement for your open source project that's hosted on GitHub. Contributors digitally sign your CLA by signing in with GitHub. Then, it automatically marks up your pull requests based on whether the contributors have all signed your CLA.

Right now it's running at https://www.clahub.com

I don't intend for this to lead to a proliferation of CLAs. But when they're appropriate, I hope it can reduce the friction of contribution.

This project is a work-in-progress. Any and all feedback is welcome!

It currently works, but could use UI and functionality improvement. Find such discussion in GitHub issues.

Build status

What's a CLA?

Contributor Agreements are a way to prove intellectual property (IP) provenance of contributions to an open-source project. They generally say that:

1. The code I’m contributing is mine, and I have the right to license it.

2. I’m granting you a license to distribute said code under the terms of this agreement (typically “as you see fit” or “under an OSI-approved license” or whatever).

-- From Contributor License Agreements by Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Here's some more background on CLAs:

• Wikipedia page for CLAs
• A CLA By Any Other Name on Groklaw

Want to choose a CLA? Harmony Agreements is a web tool that helps you quickly select a CLA:

• http://www.harmonyagreements.org/

Legal disclaimer

I am not a lawyer, and none of the CLAhub documentation, functionality, or other communication constitutes legal advice. Consult your lawyer about contributor agreements for your project.

Development

Prerequisites

Register a new app at GitHub to get an OAuth key and secret:

https://github.com/settings/applications/new

Set up a .env file with your GITHUB_KEY and GITHUB_SECRET. You can also specify an HTTP port for local foreman:

GITHUB_KEY=abc123
GITHUB_SECRET=234897239872394832478
GITHUB_LIMITED_KEY=xyz789
GITHUB_LIMITED_SECRET=2390482390482
PORT=3000

Register for two new GitHub applications, one will be used for project owner signups and one for contributors signups.

You will need to configure the authorization callback URL for each:

• Full access: http://127.0.0.1:3000/auth/github/callback
• Limited-access signature-only callback: https://127.0.0.1:3000/auth/github_limited/callback

This file is .gitignored so it's private.

We use the dotenv gem to provide these variables to the test environment as well.

JavaScript acceptance tests use poltergeist which requires installing PhantomJS. Follow the PhantomJS installation instructions on the poltergeist README.

Getting set up

Install gems and initialize databases:

bundle
rake db:create db:migrate db:test:prepare

Run the tests to make sure things are working:

rake

Running the app

Run with Foreman if you like:

foreman start

Or as normal (.env is loaded by dotenv gem):

rails server
rails console

Coverage

Use SimpleCov to build code coverage:

COVERAGE=true rake

LiveReload

When working on display-heavy features, LiveReload saves valuable keystrokes and time. We use guard-livereload to watch templates and assets and reload when they change.

To take advantage of this:

• Install a LiveReload browser extension
• Run guard on the command line.

Development and Webhooks

As part of the app, we sign up to receive GitHub webhooks (HTTP requests to /repo_hook) to be notified when stuff happens to repos we care about. (In particular, we want to know about new pushes so we can assess whether their contributors have agreed to the relevant CLA.)

When you're developing locally, GitHub can't send webhook events to you at localhost:3000, so use a local tunnelling service like ngrok or localtunnel.me.

Then, you should run the Rails server with the HOST environment variable set, like HOST=http://my.fancy.dynamic.host.name rails server, or set it in .env if using foreman. This is read in config/initializers/host.rb

Note that the dynamic hostname you use is saved in the GitHub webhook registrations. If your dynamic hostname changes, you will need to update the webhooks in GitHub so that it knows where to send the requests.

Deployment

See DEPLOY.md for information on deploying.

License

See LICENSE for the project license.

The "Clipboard and pencil" graphic used in the homepage logo is licensed from iStockPhoto.com:

http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-illustration-16006726-clipboard-and-pencil.php

The graphic is licensed for a single-seat install and is in use at https://www.clahub.com. It is not licensed for multi-seat use, so any other installations should purchase a separate license or use a different image.

http://www.istockphoto.com/help/licenses