Dev Guide - oils-for-unix/oils GitHub Wiki

If you want to fix or enhance Oils, this is where to start!

Table of Contents

• Contributing - setting up your dev environment
  • Making Pull Requests
  • Spec Tests are essential for design and implementation
• Oils Dev Cheat Sheet - a concise list of commands you may want to run
• Fourth Grant Goals and Guidelines
• Tips
  • Process Tracing Tips and Tools
  • Tips on Reducing Bugs to Small Test Cases
  • Git Tips -- Patterns for using Git on this project.
• AI Contribution Policy

Blog Posts by Contributors

• Bram
  • --help is not a specification
  • Debugging complicated shell scripts
  • Tracing shell scripts

TODO: Link to your posts here

To Sort Through

Some of these pages may be old:

• Oil Ninja Build
• Oil Native Quick Start
• OLD: Developing Oil With Nix
• Where Contributors Have Problems - initially written 2022
  • October 2025 Posting / October 2025 Reply
• Soil our CI
• Interactive Shell
  • Testing the Interactive Shell -- a bunch of manual test cases
  • Debugging Completion Scripts -- the useful --debug-file flag!

Collaborations

• Using Zephyr ASDL
• Implementing the Oil Expression Language
• Fish Oil Brainstorming
• Running ble.sh With Oil
• Running Package Builds with OSH
• Research Questions