Selenium has quite a few repositories of code that you can check out, explore, and contribute to. The first thing that you will need to do to get a local copy is to install Git (for more information, visit https://git-scm.com). Git is available on all the major operating systems, so installing it should be a relatively pain-free process. If you don't just want to use the command line, you may want to have a look at the following additional clients. Some people like them, whereas others are fine with a Terminal:
- TortoiseGit: https://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/
- The GitHub Windows client: https://windows.github.com
- The GitHub Mac client: https://mac.github.com
Once you have installed Git, you can check out any of the Selenium code bases. When you first start looking at them, don't worry about forking local copies. You'll only need to do this if you want to raise pull requests. All Selenium code repositories are now held on GitHub (for more information, visit https://github.com/SeleniumHQ). First of all, the best thing to do is just check out an individual code base and have a play. Let's do this right now. We will start with the Selenium website, https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/www.seleniumhq.org:
git clone https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/www.seleniumhq.org.git
To get everything up-and-running, we are going to need to install a couple of things:
- Maven
- Python (at least version 2.7.9 to ensure that pip is bundled with it)
Then, you will need to install Sphinx, as follows:
pip install -U Sphinx
Sphinx is a documentation generator that is used by the Selenium project to generate the Selenium website (visit http://sphinx-doc.org for more information). It will take reStructuredText files and convert them into other formats (in this case, HTML). Now you are ready to build the project:
mvn clean install
After this, you can start up the site in exploded mode:
mvn jetty:run-exploded
You can now navigate to the Selenium website in your local browser by visiting http://localhost:8080/. If you make changes, they should be automatically updated since you are running in the exploded mode. All that you will need to do is refresh the browser. Have a look around and see how easy it is to change things.