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Contributing

Thank you for your interest in contributing to Tendermint! Before contributing, it may be helpful to understand the goal of the project. The goal of Tendermint is to develop a BFT consensus engine robust enough to support permissionless value-carrying networks. While all contributions are welcome, contributors should bear this goal in mind in deciding if they should target the main tendermint project or a potential fork. When targeting the main Tendermint project, the following process leads to the best chance of landing changes in master.

All work on the code base should be motivated by a Github Issue. Search is a good place start when looking for places to contribute. If you would like to work on an issue which already exists, please indicate so by leaving a comment.

All new contributions should start with a Github Issue. The issue helps capture the problem you're trying to solve and allows for early feedback. Once the issue is created the process can proceed in different directions depending on how well defined the problem and potential solution are. If the change is simple and well understood, maintainers will indicate their support with a heartfelt emoji.

If the issue would benefit from thorough discussion, maintainers may request that you create a Request For Comment. Discussion at the RFC stage will build collective understanding of the dimensions of the problems and help structure conversations around trade-offs.

When the problem is well understood but the solution leads to large structural changes to the code base, these changes should be proposed in the form of an Architectural Decision Record (ADR). The ADR will help build consensus on an overall strategy to ensure the code base maintains coherence in the larger context. If you are not comfortable with writing an ADR, you can open a less-formal issue and the maintainers will help you turn it into an ADR. ADR numbers can be registered here.

When the problem as well as proposed solution are well understood, changes should start with a draft pull request against master. The draft signals that work is underway. When the work is ready for feedback, hitting "Ready for Review" will signal to the maintainers to take a look.

Contributing flow

Each stage of the process is aimed at creating feedback cycles which align contributors and maintainers to make sure:

  • Contributors don’t waste their time implementing/proposing features which won’t land in master.
  • Maintainers have the necessary context in order to support and review contributions.

Forking

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:

  • Create the fork on github, using the fork button.
  • Go to the original repo checked out locally (i.e. $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)

Dependencies

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.

Protobuf

When working with protobuf there are a few things you should know. We use buf for our linting and breaking changes checking. If you would like to run linting and check if the changes you have made are breaking then you will have to install the needed dependencies with make buf. Then the linting cmd will be make proto-lint and the breaking changes check will be make proto-check-breaking. To generate new stubs based off of your changes you can run make proto-gen (you can do this outside of GOPATH).

Vagrant

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

Changelog

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.

Branching Model and Release

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.

Development Procedure

  • the latest state of development is on master
  • master must never fail make test
  • never --force onto master (except when reverting a broken commit, which should seldom happen)
  • create a development branch either on github.com/tendermint/tendermint, or your fork (using git remote add origin)
  • make changes and update the CHANGELOG_PENDING.md to record your change
  • before submitting a pull request, run git rebase on top of the latest master

Pull Merge Procedure

  • ensure pull branch is based on a recent master
  • run make test to ensure that all tests pass
  • squash merge pull request
  • the unstable branch may be used to aggregate pull merges before fixing tests

Release Procedure

Major Release

  1. start on master
  2. run integration tests (see test_integrations in Makefile)
  3. prepare release in a pull request against master (to be squash merged):
    • copy CHANGELOG_PENDING.md to top of CHANGELOG.md
    • run python ./scripts/linkify_changelog.py CHANGELOG.md to add links for all issues
    • run bash ./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>
    • reset the CHANGELOG_PENDING.md
    • bump versions
  4. push your changes with prepared release details to vX.X (this will trigger the release vX.X.0)
  5. merge back to master (don't squash merge!)

Minor Release

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.

Backport Release

  1. start from the existing release branch you want to backport changes to (e.g. v0.30) Branch to a release/vX.X.X branch locally (e.g. release/v0.30.7)
  2. cherry pick the commit(s) that contain the changes you want to backport (usually these commits are from squash-merged PRs which were already reviewed)
  3. steps 2 and 3 from Major Release
  4. push changes to release/vX.X.X branch
  5. open a PR against the existing vX.X branch

Testing

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.

RPC Testing

If you contribute to the RPC endpoints it's important to document your changes in the Swagger file To test your changes you should install nodejs and run:

npm i -g dredd
make build-linux build-contract-tests-hooks
make contract-tests

This command will popup a network and check every endpoint against what has been documented