In this post, we will talk about how to effectively maintain your open source projects using tools and software that are free to use for open source and public repositories. Over time, as the project grows, you need to set up a few tools that can help you maintain the project and automate trivial tasks.
1. Set Up CI/CD
Having an open source project that you might be contributing to just as a hobby doesn't mean you don't need to set up a CI/CD pipeline. You don't need to spend money on servers or use cloud services to run your CI/CD pipeline. There are a lot of CI/CD tools available for free for open source projects and public repositories.
Travis CI
One such tool is Travis CI , which you can use for setting up CI/CD for your project.
You can run test cases and deploy code to your servers. Travis CI works well and is easy to set up for a CI/CD pipeline.
2. Code Analysis and Code Quality
Maintaining code quality as the project grows can be very hard and time-consuming. Thankfully, there are several tools that can help you automate continuous code analysis.
Scrutinizer
Scrutinizer is a great tool that you can use to automate code quality and code analysis for your project. Scrutinizer is free for open source projects and public repositories.
Similar tools include CodeFactor .
3. Code Styling and Indentation
It's very important to have a consistent coding style and proper code indentation. For open source projects, it becomes even more important. There will be contributors who follow different code styles and prefer different code indentation practices.
Over time, it's hard to maintain the same style throughout the code through code reviews. Tools like StyleCI can ease that pain.
You can set up StyleCI or something equivalent that supports your project's programming language. StyleCI automatically checks pull requests for styling issues and can open a pull request to fix them.
An example pull request generated by StyleCI.
4. Security
It's important to automatically find, prioritize, and fix vulnerabilities in the project and in the open source dependencies used by the project. Snyk is useful in that respect.
Snyk offers unlimited tests on open source projects. Snyk can monitor vulnerabilities and inform you about them. You can also set it up to automate fixes with a one-click fix pull request populated with the required upgrades and patches.
Thanks for reading. If you have some feedback, please reach out to me on Twitter or GitHub .