Extending

You do not need to fork this repository to make .principles useful for your team.

The built-in catalog is the shared public baseline. Your organization can layer its own principles on top.

What extension looks like

Create an extra catalog directory that follows the same structure as principles/ in this repo.

That catalog can contain:

organization-specific principles
domain rules that are too local for the shared public catalog
team conventions backed by your own internal standards

Register the extra catalog

You can register an extra catalog at several levels:

bash

# User-level
echo ~/acme-principles >> ~/.principles-extra

# Per-project
echo /shared/acme-principles >> my-project/.principles-extra

# One-off vendoring
./install.sh vendor my-project --extra-catalog ~/acme-principles

Corporate and personal catalogs can coexist.

When to extend instead of contributing upstream

Use an extra catalog when the rule is:

specific to your company or product
specific to your domain
based on an internal standard rather than a published shared source

Contribute upstream when the principle belongs to the public software engineering literature and would help many teams, not just your own.

Deep reference and examples