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Contributing

Grafana Agent uses GitHub to manage reviews of pull requests.

If you're planning to do a large amount of work, you should discuss your ideas in an issue or an RFC. This will help you avoid unnecessary work and surely give you and us a good deal of inspiration.

Pull requests can be opened immediately without an issue for trivial fixes or improvements.

Before Contributing

Steps to Contribute

Should you wish to work on an issue, please claim it first by commenting on the GitHub issue that you want to work on it. This is to prevent duplicated efforts from contributors on the same issue.

Please check the good first issue label to find issues that are good for getting started. If you have questions about one of the issues, with or without the tag, please comment on them and one of the maintainers will clarify it. For a quicker response, contact us in the #agent channel in our community Slack.

See next section for detailed instructions to compile the project. For quickly compiling and testing your changes do:

# For building:
go build ./cmd/agent/
./agent -config.file=<config-file>

# For testing:
make lint test # Make sure all the tests pass before you commit and push :)

We use golangci-lint for linting the code.

As a last resort, if linting reports an issue and you think that the warning needs to be disregarded or is a false-positive, you can add a special comment //nolint:linter1[,linter2,...] before the offending line.

All our issues are regularly tagged with labels so that you can also filter down the issues involving the components you want to work on.

Compiling the Agent

To build Grafana Agent from source code, please install the following tools:

  1. Git
  2. Go (version 1.18 and up)
  3. Make
  4. Docker

You can directly use the go tool to download and install the agent binary into your GOPATH:

$ GO111MODULE=on go install github.com/grafana/agent/cmd/agent
$ agent -config.file=your_config.yml

An example of the above configuration file can be found here.

You can also clone the repository yourself and build using make agent:

$ mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/grafana
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/grafana
$ git clone https://github.com/grafana/agent.git
$ cd agent
$ make agent
$ ./agent -config.file=your_config.yml

The Makefile provides several targets:

  • agent: build the agent binary
  • test: run the tests
  • lint: run linting checks

Compile on Linux

Compiling Grafana Agent on Linux requires a couple of extra dependencies:

  • systemd headers for Promtail
    • Can be installed on Debian-based distributions with: sudo apt-get install libsystemd-dev
  • bcc tools for the eBPF integration on AMD64 systems
    • Can be installed on Debian-based distributions with: sudo apt-get install libbpfcc-dev

If you have issues installing the bcc tooling, you can use -tags=noebpf to compile Grafana Agent without the eBPF integration.

Pull Request Checklist

Changes should be branched off of the main branch. It's recommended to rebase on top of main before submitting the pull request to fix any merge conflicts that may have appeared during development.

PRs should not introduce regressions or introduce any critical bugs. If your PR isn't covered by existing tests, some tests should be added to validate the new code (note that 100% code coverage is not a requirement). Smaller PRs are more likely to be reviewed faster and easier to validate for correctness; consider splitting up your work across multiple PRs if making a significant contribution.

If your PR is not getting reviewed or you need a specific person to review it, you can @-reply a reviewer asking for a review in the pull request or a comment, or you can ask for a review on the Slack channel #agent.

Updating the changelog

We keep a changelog of code changes which result in new or changed user-facing behavior.

Changes are grouped by change type, denoted by ### Category_Name. The change types are, in order:

  1. Security fixes
  2. Breaking changes
  3. Deprecations
  4. Features
  5. Enhancements
  6. Bugfixes
  7. Other changes

Categories won't be listed if there's not any changes for that category.

When opening a PR which impacts user-facing behavior, contributors should:

  1. Determine which changes need to be documented in the changelog (a PR may change more than one user-facing behavior).

  2. If there are no other changes for that change type, add a header for it (e.g., ### Bugfixes). Make sure to keep the order listed above.

  3. Add relevant entries into the changelog.

When in doubt, look at a previous release for style and ordering examples.

Changelog entry style tips

Change entries in the changelog should:

  1. Be complete sentences, ending in a period. It is acceptible to use multiple complete sentences if one sentence can't accurately describe the change.
  2. Describe the impact on the user which is reading the changelog.
  3. Include credit to the Github user that opened the PR following the sentence.

For example: - Config file reading is now 1500% faster. (@torvalds)

Readers should be able to understand how a change impacts them. Default to being explicit over vague.

  • Vague: - Fixed issue with metric names. (@ghost)
  • Explicit: - Fixed issue where instances of the letter s in metric names were replaced with z. (@ghost)

Dependency management

The Grafana Agent project uses Go modules to manage dependencies on external packages.

To add or update a new dependency, use the go get command:

# Pick the latest tagged release.
go install example.com/some/module/pkg@latest

# Pick a specific version.
go install example.com/some/module/pkg@vX.Y.Z

Tidy up the go.mod and go.sum files:

# The GO111MODULE variable can be omitted when the code isn't located in GOPATH.
GO111MODULE=on go mod tidy

You have to commit the changes to go.mod and go.sum before submitting the pull request.