Thank you for considering making contributions to Tendermint and related repositories! Start by taking a look at the coding repo for overall information on repository workflow and standards.
Please follow standard github best practices: fork the repo, branch from the tip of master
, make some commits, and submit a pull request to master
.
See the open issues for things we need help with!
Before making a pull request, please open an issue describing the change you would like to make. If an issue for your change already exists, please comment on it that you will submit a pull request. Be sure to reference the issue in the opening comment of your pull request. If your change is substantial, you will be asked to write a more detailed design document in the form of an Architectural Decision Record (ie. see here) before submitting code changes.
Please open a Draft PR, even if your contribution is incomplete, this inidicates 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.
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 running make lint
Please note that Go requires code to live under absolute paths, which complicates forking.
While my fork lives at https://github.com/ebuchman/tendermint
,
the code should never exist at $GOPATH/src/github.com/ebuchman/tendermint
.
Instead, we use git remote
to add the fork as a new remote for the original repo,
$GOPATH/src/github.com/tendermint/tendermint
, and do all the work there.
For instance, to create a fork and work on a branch of it, I would:
$GOPATH/src/github.com/tendermint/tendermint
)git remote rename origin upstream
git remote add origin git@github.com:ebuchman/basecoin.git
Now origin
refers to my fork and upstream
refers to the tendermint version.
So I can git push -u origin master
to update my fork, and make pull requests to tendermint 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)We use go modules to manage dependencies.
That said, the master branch of every Tendermint 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 go mod tidy
. Even for dependencies under our control, go 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 go list -u -m all
to get a list of dependencies that may not be
up-to-date.
When updating dependencies, please only update the particular dependencies you
need. Instead of running go get -u=patch
, which will update anything,
specify exactly the dependency you want to update, eg.
GO111MODULE=on go get -u github.com/tendermint/go-amino@master
.
If you are a Vagrant user, you can get started hacking Tendermint with the commands below.
NOTE: In case you installed Vagrant in 2017, you might need to run
vagrant box update
to upgrade to the latest ubuntu/xenial64
.
vagrant up
vagrant ssh
make test
Every fix, improvement, feature, or breaking change should be made in a
pull-request that includes an update to the CHANGELOG_PENDING.md
file.
Changelog entries should be formatted as follows:
- [module] \#xxx Some description about the change (@contributor)
Here, module
is the part of the code that changed (typically a
top-level Go package), xxx
is the pull-request number, and contributor
is the author/s of the change.
It's also acceptable for xxx
to refer to the relevent issue number, but pull-request
numbers are preferred.
Note this means pull-requests should be opened first so the changelog can then
be updated with the pull-request's number.
There is no need to include the full link, as this will be added
automatically during release. But please include the backslash and pound, eg. \#2313
.
Changelog entries should be ordered alphabetically according to the
module
, and numerically according to the pull-request number.
Changes with multiple classifications should be doubly included (eg. a bug fix that is also a breaking change should be recorded under both).
Breaking changes are further subdivided according to the APIs/users they impact.
Any change that effects multiple APIs/users should be recorded multiply - for
instance, a change to the Blockchain Protocol
that removes a field from the
header should also be recorded under CLI/RPC/Config
since the field will be
removed from the header in rpc responses as well.
The main development branch is master.
Every release is maintained in a release branch named vX.Y.Z
.
Note all pull requests should be squash merged except for merging to a release branch (named vX.Y
). This keeps the commit history clean and makes it
easy to reference the pull request where a change was introduced.
master
master
must never fail make test
master
(except when reverting a broken commit, which should seldom happen)git remote add origin
)CHANGELOG_PENDING.md
to record your changegit rebase
on top of the latest master
master
make test
to ensure that all tests passunstable
branch may be used to aggregate pull merges before fixing testsmaster
test_integrations
in Makefile)master
(to be squash merged):
CHANGELOG_PENDING.md
to top of CHANGELOG.md
python ./scripts/linkify_changelog.py CHANGELOG.md
to add links for
all issuesbash ./scripts/authors.sh
to get a list of authors since the latest
release, and add the github aliases of external contributors to the top of
the changelog. To lookup an alias from an email, try bash ./scripts/authors.sh <email>
CHANGELOG_PENDING.md
vX.X
(this will trigger the release vX.X.0
)If there were no breaking changes and you need to create a release nonetheless, the procedure is almost exactly like with a new release above.
The only difference is that in the end you create a pull request against the existing X.X
branch.
The branch name should match the release number you want to create.
Merging this PR will trigger the next release.
For example, if the PR is against an existing 0.34 branch which already contains a v0.34.0 release/tag,
the patch version will be incremented and the created release will be v0.34.1.
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
.