Thank you for considering making contributions to Cosmos-SDK and related repositories!
Contributing to this repo can mean many things such as participated in discussion or proposing code changes. To ensure a smooth workflow for all contributors, the general procedure for contributing has been established:
- either open or find an issue you'd like to help with,
- participate in thoughtful discussion on that issue,
- if you would then like to contribute code:
- if a the issue is a proposal, ensure that the proposal has been accepted,
- ensure that nobody else has already begun working on this issue, if they have make sure to contact them to collaborate,
- if nobody has been assigned the issue and you would like to work on it make a comment on the issue to inform the community of your intentions to begin work,
- follow standard github best practices: fork the repo, branch from the
tip of
develop
, make some commits, and submit a PR todevelop
, - include
WIP:
in the PR-title to and submit your PR early, even if it's incomplete, this indicates to the community you're working on something and allows them to provide comments early in the development process. When the code is complete it can be marked as ready-for-review by replacingWIP:
withR4R:
in the PR-title.
Note that for very small or blatantly obvious problems (such as typos) it is not required to an open issue to submit a PR, but be aware that for more complex problems/features, if a PR is opened before an adequate design discussion has taken place in a github issue, that PR runs a high likelihood of being rejected.
Take a peek at our coding repo for
overall information on repository workflow and standards. Note, we use make get_dev_tools
and make update_dev_tools
for installing the linting tools.
Other notes:
- Looking for a good place to start contributing? How about checking out some good first issues
- Please make sure to use
gofmt
before every commit - the easiest way to do this is have your editor run it for you upon saving a file. Additionally please ensure that your code is lint compliant by runningmake lint
To accommodate review process we suggest that PRs are categorically broken up. Ideally each PR addresses only a single issue. Additionally, as much as possible code refactoring and cleanup should be submitted as a separate PRs from bugfixes/feature-additions.
Please note that Go requires code to live under absolute paths, which complicates forking.
While my fork lives at https://github.com/rigeyrigerige/cosmos-sdk
,
the code should never exist at $GOPATH/src/github.com/rigeyrigerige/cosmos-sdk
.
Instead, we use git remote
to add the fork as a new remote for the original repo,
$GOPATH/src/github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk
, and do all the work there.
For instance, to create a fork and work on a branch of it, I would:
- Create the fork on github, using the fork button.
- Go to the original repo checked out locally (i.e.
$GOPATH/src/github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk
) git remote rename origin upstream
git remote add origin [email protected]:ebuchman/basecoin.git
Now origin
refers to my fork and upstream
refers to the Cosmos-SDK version.
So I can git push -u origin master
to update my fork, and make pull requests to Cosmos-SDK from there.
Of course, replace ebuchman
with your git handle.
To pull in updates from the origin repo, run
git fetch upstream
git rebase upstream/master
(or whatever branch you want)
Please don't make Pull Requests to master
.
We use dep to manage dependencies.
That said, the master branch of every Cosmos repository should just build
with go get
, which means they should be kept up-to-date with their
dependencies so we can get away with telling people they can just go get
our
software.
Since some dependencies are not under our control, a third party may break our
build, in which case we can fall back on dep ensure
(or make get_vendor_deps
). Even for dependencies under our control, dep helps us to
keep multiple repos in sync as they evolve. Anything with an executable, such
as apps, tools, and the core, should use dep.
Run dep status
to get a list of vendor dependencies that may not be
up-to-date.
All repos should be hooked up to CircleCI.
If they have .go
files in the root directory, they will be automatically
tested by circle using go test -v -race ./...
. If not, they will need a
circle.yml
. Ideally, every repo has a Makefile
that defines make test
and
includes its continuous integration status using a badge in the README.md
.
We expect tests to use require
or assert
rather than t.Skip
or t.Fail
,
unless there is a reason to do otherwise.
When testing a function under a variety of different inputs, we prefer to use
table driven tests.
Table driven test error messages should follow the following format
<desc>, tc #<index>, i #<index>
.
<desc>
is an optional short description of whats failing, tc
is the
index within the table of the testcase that is failing, and i
is when there
is a loop, exactly which iteration of the loop failed.
The idea is you should be able to see the
error message and figure out exactly what failed.
Here is an example check:
<some table>
for tcIndex, tc := range cases {
<some code>
for i := 0; i < tc.numTxsToTest; i++ {
<some code>
require.Equal(t, expectedTx[:32], calculatedTx[:32],
"First 32 bytes of the txs differed. tc #%d, i #%d", tcIndex, i)
User-facing repos should adhere to the branching model: http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/. That is, these repos should be well versioned, and any merge to master requires a version bump and tagged release.
Libraries need not follow the model strictly, but would be wise to.
The SDK utilizes semantic versioning.
Ensure that you base and target your PR on the correct branch:
release/vxx.yy.zz
for a merge into a release candidatemaster
for a merge of a releasedevelop
in the usual case
All feature additions should be targeted against develop
. Bug fixes for an outstanding release candidate
should be targeted against the release candidate branch. Release candidate branches themselves should be the
only pull requests targeted directly against master.
- the latest state of development is on
develop
develop
must never failmake test
ormake test_cli
develop
should not failmake test_lint
- no --force onto
develop
(except when reverting a broken commit, which should seldom happen) - create a development branch either on github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk, or your fork (using
git remote add origin
) - before submitting a pull request, begin
git rebase
on top ofdevelop
- ensure pull branch is rebased on develop
- run
make test
andmake test_cli
to ensure that all tests pass - merge pull request
- push master may request that pull requests be rebased on top of
unstable
- start on
develop
- prepare changelog/release issue
- bump versions
- push to release-vX.X.X to run CI
- merge to master
- merge master back to develop
- start on
master
- checkout a new branch named hotfix-vX.X.X
- make the required changes
- these changes should be small and an absolute necessity
- add a note to CHANGELOG.md
- bump versions
- push to hotfix-vX.X.X to run the extended integration tests on the CI
- merge hotfix-vX.X.X to master
- merge hotfix-vX.X.X to develop
- delete the hotfix-vX.X.X branch