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Pact Open Source Update — October 2022

· 6 min read

Welcome to the October Pact Open Source update! I’ve got some great things to share this month – new PRs, some awesome community members writing and talking about contract testing, plus a sneak peak of our upcoming Pact Plugin Framework launch! Let’s get into it.

Summary of the good stuff​

Merged PRs​

It's been a busy couple of months, and the PRs have been coming thick and fast. Here's a roundup of the top merged PRs.

PRs awaiting review​

You don't have to start writing code to get involved. There's always a raft of open pull requests eagerly awaiting review. You can check out the full list here, but I've pulled out some of the juiciest ones, which will make a big impact when they land. Any help on these would be greatly appreciated!

Updates to documentation and learning materials​

The following documentation is now live, or updated on the site:

  • Pact-Specification
    • All about the spec. Learn the history, philosophy, implementation support, migration notes, and more.
    • See it 👉 here
  • Pact-Plugins
    • The Pact plugins docs are now syncing from their readme, and displayed alongside our other Pact tooling.
    • Join us for the official launch next month
      • You can checkout the details and register 👉 here
  • Webhook template library
    • Updated to use the new contract requiring verification published event. We'd love your help to add new ones to the list!
    • See them 👉 here
  • Branch support in Client libraries
    • The list has been updated to show the latest state of play.
    • See it 👉 here
  • Community Repos
    • We've got a new showcase for Pact based repos in the wild. List yours here.
    • See them 👉 here
  • New articles
  • New workflow recommendations
    • A large scale migration of the docs, to use our new recommended configuration
    • See it in action in the updated CI/CD workshop 👉 here

Community corner - member shout outs​

Paulo Gonçalves​

We know it can be difficult to visualise the path to Pact Nirvana, the recommend CI/CD setup for your Pact integrations. Contributors have been adding their valuable experiences from lessons learnt in the field.

Paulo Gonçalves did just that in this repository. It exemplifies the best implementations of contract testing, reaching Pact Nirvana and having control via pipeline and pact-broker in a completely reliable way. This provides security to deploy quickly, safely, and more frequently.

Please give the repository a star ⭐ as this is a great motivator for Paulo to continue to create quality software content, which is 100% free to use!

PLUS extra kudos to Paulo, who delivered a contract testing workshop entirely in Portuguese for our Portuguese-speaking friends!

Eric Deandrea and Holly Cummins​

Many thanks to Eric Deandrea and Holly Cummins, who co-delivered a fantastic, funny talk at Devoxx Belgium on "How to avoid common pitfalls with modern microservices testing". I enjoyed watching this, and think challenging mental models is a wonderful way to break down an often complex and misunderstood subject

Holly has been particularly active whilst she worked in the IBM Garage, so it's wonderful to see her delivering fantastic talks.

Liran Tal​

A talented Developer Advocate, Liran Tal at Snyk is a long-time friend of the Pact Open Source Foundation. He often tours the conference circuit in his easily recognizable green hat.

Liran created the incredible Comprehensive Guide to Contract Testing APIs in a Service Oriented Architecture". He's also the author of awesome-contract-testing because, as you already know, contract testing is AWESOME! 👌 And because we love videos, I recommend his talk Consumer-Driven Contract: A better approach for API Testing from APIdays Barcelona.

Thank you to all our community members. The effort you put into our community is appreciated!

Become a contributor​

As the Pact Community Shepherd, I'm dedicated to making it as easy as possible to get involved in the Pact Open Source Project.

There's no minimum time commitment, but we highly value regular, committed contributions, as these make the Pact OSS vibrant and healthy.

Not sure where to start?

With the impending official launch of the Pact Plugins Framework, we're on the lookout for enthusiasts who want to build their own profile and be a part of the future of Pact. We're looking for individual people or teams interested in extending Pact by creating a plugin

  • such as Avro or GraphQL content type or a Websockets transport.

If this sounds like something you'd like to know more about, join us next month at our launch event to learn about the Plugin Framework and how you can get involved. You can checkout the details and register 👉 here

Whether you've participated before or are ready to take the first plunge, the team and I are here to support you! Need extra convincing? I wrote about why participating in OSS projects is awesome, for DevPro Journal!

You can also read our Pact Open contributing page to learn about the different ways to get involved in Open Source, no matter what role or skillset you hold.

That's all for now. Catch you on Slack!

  • Yousaf Nabi -- Developer Advocate at PactFlow and Community Shepherd at Pact.