Contributors to Tree-sitter should abide by the Contributor Covenant.
To make changes to Tree-sitter, you should have:
grammar.js
Clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter cd tree-sitter
Optionally, build the WASM library. If you skip this step, then the tree-sitter playground command will require an internet connection. If you have emscripten installed, this will use your emcc compiler. Otherwise, it will use Docker or Podman:
tree-sitter playground
emcc
./script/build-wasm
Build the Rust libraries and the CLI:
cargo build --release
This will create the tree-sitter CLI executable in the target/release folder.
tree-sitter
target/release
Before you can run the tests, you need to clone some grammars that are used for testing:
script/fetch-fixtures
To test any changes you’ve made to the CLI, you can regenerate these parsers using your current CLI code:
script/generate-fixtures
Then you can run the tests:
script/test
Similarly, to test the WASM binding, you need to compile these parsers to WASM:
script/generate-fixtures-wasm script/test-wasm
The test script has a number of useful flags. You can list them all by running script/test -h. Here are some of the main flags:
script/test -h
If you want to run a specific unit test, pass its name (or part of its name) as an argument:
script/test test_does_something
You can run the tests under the debugger (either lldb or gdb) using the -g flag:
lldb
gdb
-g
script/test test_does_something -g
Part of the Tree-sitter test suite involves parsing the corpus tests for several different languages and performing randomized edits to each example in the corpus. If you just want to run the tests for a particular language, you can pass the -l flag. And if you want to run a particular example from the corpus, you can pass the -e flag:
-l
-e
script/test -l javascript -e Arrays
The main tree-sitter/tree-sitter repository contains the source code for several packages that are published to package registries for different languages:
tree-sitter/tree-sitter
tree-sitter-highlight
tree-sitter-cli
web-tree-sitter
There are also several other dependent repositories that contain other published packages:
tree-sitter/node-tree-sitter
tree-sitter/py-tree-sitter
Publishing a new release of the CLI requires these steps:
Commit and push all outstanding changes and verify that CI passes:
git commit -m "Fix things" git push
Create a new tag:
script/version patch
This will determine the current version, increment the patch version number, and update the Cargo.toml and package.json files for the Rust and Node CLI packages. It will then create a commit and a tag for the new version. For more information about the arguments that are allowed, see the documentation for the npm version command.
Cargo.toml
package.json
npm version
Push the commit and the tag:
git push git push --tags
Wait for CI to pass. Because of the git tag, the CI jobs will publish artifacts to a GitHub release. The npm module of tree-sitter-cli works by downloading the appropriate binary from the corresponding GitHub release during installation. So it’s best not to publish the npm package until the binaries are uploaded.
Publish the npm package:
cd cli/npm npm publish