Mole/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Mole

Setup

# Install development tools
brew install shfmt shellcheck bats-core golangci-lint

# Install goimports for better Go formatting
go install golang.org/x/tools/cmd/goimports@latest

# Install pre-commit hook (runs format/lint checks on every commit)
git config core.hooksPath .githooks

Development

Run quality checks before committing (auto-formats code):

./scripts/check.sh

Run tests:

./scripts/test.sh

Code Style

Basic Rules

• Bash 3.2+ compatible (macOS default)
• 4 spaces indent
• Use set -euo pipefail in all scripts
• Quote all variables: "$variable"
• Use [[ ]] not [ ] for tests
• Use local for function variables, readonly for constants
• Function names: snake_case
• BSD commands not GNU (e.g., stat -f%z not stat --format)

Config: .editorconfig and .shellcheckrc

File Operations

Always use safe wrappers, never rm -rf directly:

# Single file/directory
safe_remove "/path/to/file"

# Purge files older than 7 days
safe_find_delete "$dir" "*.log" 7 "f"

# With sudo
safe_sudo_remove "/Library/Caches/com.example"

See lib/core/file_ops.sh for all safe functions.

Pipefail Safety

All commands that might fail must be handled:

# Correct: handle failure
find /nonexistent -name "*.cache" 2>/dev/null || true

# Correct: check array before use
if [[ ${#array[@]} -gt 0 ]]; then
    for item in "${array[@]}"; do
        process "$item"
    done
fi

# Correct: arithmetic operations
((count++)) || true

Error Handling

# Network requests with timeout
result=$(curl -fsSL --connect-timeout 2 --max-time 3 "$url" 2>/dev/null || echo "")

# Command existence check
if ! command -v brew >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    log_warning "Homebrew not installed"
    return 0
fi

UI and Logging

# Logging
log_info "Starting cleanup"
log_success "Cache cleaned"
log_warning "Some files skipped"
log_error "Operation failed"

# Spinners
with_spinner "Cleaning cache" rm -rf "$cache_dir"

# Or inline
start_inline_spinner "Processing..."
# ... work ...
stop_inline_spinner "Complete"

Debug Mode

Enable debug output with --debug:

mo --debug clean
./bin/clean.sh --debug

Modules check the internal MO_DEBUG variable:

if [[ "${MO_DEBUG:-0}" == "1" ]]; then
    echo "[MODULE] Debug message" >&2
fi

Format: [MODULE_NAME] message output to stderr.

Requirements

• macOS 10.14 or newer, works on Intel and Apple Silicon
• Default macOS Bash 3.2+ plus administrator privileges for cleanup tasks
• Install Command Line Tools with xcode-select --install for curl, tar, and related utilities
• Go 1.24+ is required to build the mo status or mo analyze TUI binaries locally.

Go Components

mo status and mo analyze use Go with Bubble Tea for interactive dashboards.

Code organization:

• Each module split into focused files by responsibility
• cmd/analyze/ - Disk analyzer with 7 files under 500 lines each
• cmd/status/ - System monitor with metrics split into 11 domain files

Development workflow:

• Format code with gofmt -w ./cmd/...
• Run go vet ./cmd/... to check for issues
• Build with go build ./... to verify all packages compile

Building Go Binaries:

For local development:

# Build binaries for current architecture
make build

# Or run directly without building
go run ./cmd/analyze
go run ./cmd/status

For releases, GitHub Actions builds architecture-specific binaries automatically.

Guidelines:

• Keep files focused on single responsibility
• Extract constants instead of magic numbers
• Use context for timeout control on external commands
• Add comments explaining why something is done, not just what is being done.

Pull Requests

1. Fork and create branch from main
2. Make changes
3. Run checks: ./scripts/check.sh
4. Commit and push
5. Open PR targeting main

CI will verify formatting, linting, and tests.