styleguide Documentation

File: README.md Copy Chapter

Google Style Guides

Every major open-source project has its own style guide: a set of conventions
(sometimes arbitrary) about how to write code for that project. It is much
easier to understand a large codebase when all the code in it is in a consistent
style.

“Style” covers a lot of ground, from “use camelCase for variable names” to
“never use global variables” to “never use exceptions.” This project
(google/styleguide) links to the style
guidelines we use for Google code. If you are modifying a project that
originated at Google, you may be pointed to this page to see the style guides
that apply to that project.

• AngularJS Style Guide
• Common Lisp Style Guide
• C++ Style Guide
• C# Style Guide
• Go Style Guide
• HTML/CSS Style Guide
• JavaScript Style Guide
• Java Style Guide
• JSON Style Guide
• Markdown Style Guide
• Objective-C Style Guide
• Python Style Guide
• R Style Guide
• Shell Style Guide
• Swift Style Guide
• TypeScript Style Guide
• Vim script Style Guide

This project also contains google-c-style.el, an Emacs settings file
for Google style.

We used to host the cpplint tool, but we stopped making internal updates public.
An open source community has forked the project, so users are encouraged to use
https://github.com/cpplint/cpplint instead.

If your project requires that you create a new XML document format, the
XML Document Format Style Guide may be helpful. In addition to actual
style rules, it also contains advice on designing your own vs. adapting an
existing format, on XML instance document formatting, and on elements vs.
attributes.

The style guides in this project are licensed under the CC-By 3.0 License, which
encourages you to share these documents. See
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ for more details.

The following Google style guide lives outside of this project:

• Effective Dart
• Kotlin Style Guide

Since projects are largely maintained in a VCS, writing good commit messages
is important to long term project health. Please refer to How to Write a Git
Commit Message as an excellent resource. While it
explicitly refers to the Git SCM, its principles apply to any system, and many
Git conventions are trivial to translate to others.

Contributing Copy Chapter

With few exceptions, these style guides are copies of Google's internal style
guides to assist developers working on Google owned and originated open source
projects. Changes to the style guides are made to the internal style guides
first and eventually copied into the versions found here. External
contributions are not accepted. Pull requests are regularly closed without
comment.

People can file issues using the GitHub tracker. Issues that raise
questions, justify changes on technical merits, or point out obvious mistakes
may get some engagement and could in theory lead to changes, but we are
primarily optimizing for Google's internal needs.

File: docguide/README.md Copy Chapter

Google documentation guide

• Markdown styleguide
• Best practices
• README files
• Philosophy

See also Copy Chapter

• How to update this guide, for Googlers.

File: docguide/READMEs.md Copy Chapter

READMEs

About README.md files.

1. Overview
2. Readable README files
3. Where to put your README
4. What to put in your README

Overview Copy Chapter

A README is a short summary of the contents of a directory. The contents of the
file are displayed in GitHub and Gitiles when you view the contents of the
containing directory. README files provide critical information for people
browsing your code, especially first-time users.

This document covers how to create README files that are readable with GitHub
and Gitiles.

Readable README files Copy Chapter

README files must be named README.md. The file name must end with the
.md extension and is case sensitive.

For example, the file /README.md is rendered when you view the contents of the
containing directory:

https://github.com/google/styleguide/tree/gh-pages

Also README.md at HEAD ref is rendered by Gitiles when displaying repository
index:

https://gerrit.googlesource.com/gitiles/

Where to put your README Copy Chapter

Unlike all other Markdown files, README.md files should not be located inside
your product or library's documentation directory. README.md files should be
located in the top-level directory for your product or library's actual
codebase.

All top-level directories for a code package should have an up-to-date
README.md file. This is especially important for package directories that
provide interfaces for other teams.

What to put in your README Copy Chapter

At a minimum, your README.md file should contain a link to your user- and/or
team-facing documentation.

Every package-level README.md should include or point to the following
information:

1. What is in this package or library and what's it used for.
2. Points of contact.
3. Status of whether this package or library is deprecated, or not for general
   release, etc.
4. How to use the package or library. Examples include sample code, copyable
   bazel run or bazel test commands, etc.
5. Links to relevant documentation.