I started to work on fauxton (https://github.com/cloudant-labs/couchdb/tree/fauxton/src/fauxton) lately, and I found it rather hard to contribute to it. Here's how I'd love the contributor workflow to be.

my_fauxton_dream_contributor_workflow.md

from zero to hack

$ git clone https://github.com/couchdb/fauxton
$ cd fauxton
$ yeoman install
$ yeoman server

That will start fauxton at http://localhost:3501 and connect automatically to my local couch at http://localhost:5984. Thanks to yeoman, changes in HTML / CSS / JS are visible directly thanks to live reload.

issues

we'd use the repos own issues at github:
https://github.com/couchdb/fauxton/issues

testing

$ yeoman test
$ yeoman autotest

incl. headless testing with PhantomJS

building static assets to be merged in CouchDB

$ yeoman build

That should generate / update the /www folder which can be taken and merged right into the CouchDB repository

Hey @gr2m, I pushed some updates to Fauxton to substantially simplify the setup process: https://github.com/cloudant-labs/couchdb/tree/fauxton/src/fauxton. New Fauxton install process is basically:

npm install
bbb couchdebug

bbb/grunt have a similer scope to yeoman, and bbb has a similar dev server idea, but we need to switch over to using CORS to talk to CouchDB for that to work, which I'm planning on doing in the near term.