We welcome contributions from the community. Please read the following guidelines carefully to maximize the chances of your PR being merged.
- Before starting work on a major feature, please reach out to us via GitHub, Slack, email, etc. We will make sure no one else is already working on it and ask you to open a GitHub issue.
- A "major feature" is defined as any change that is > 100 LOC altered (not including tests), or changes any user-facing behavior. We will use the GitHub issue to discuss the feature and come to agreement. This is to prevent your time being wasted, as well as ours. The GitHub review process for major features is also important so that organizations with commit access can come to agreement on design. If it is appropriate to write a design document, the document must be hosted either in the GitHub tracking issue, or linked to from the issue and hosted in a world-readable location.
- Small patches and bug fixes don't need prior communication.
The Envoy community has an explicit goal to be inclusive to all. As such, all PRs must adhere to the following guidelines for all code, APIs, and documentation:
- The following words and phrases are not allowed:
- Whitelist: use allowlist instead.
- Blacklist: use denylist or blocklist instead.
- Master: use primary instead.
- Slave: use secondary or replica instead.
- Documentation should be written in an inclusive style. The Google developer documentation contains an excellent reference on this topic.
- The above policy is not considered definitive and may be amended in the future as industry best practices evolve. Additional comments on this topic may be provided by maintainers during code review.
- Fork the repo.
- Create your PR.
- Tests will automatically run for you.
- We will not merge any PR that is not passing tests.
- PRs are expected to have 100% test coverage for added code. This can be verified with a coverage build. If your PR cannot have 100% coverage for some reason please clearly explain why when you open it.
- Any PR that changes user-facing behavior must have associated documentation in docs as well as the changelog.
- All code comments and documentation are expected to have proper English grammar and punctuation. If you are not a fluent English speaker (or a bad writer ;-)) please let us know and we will try to find some help but there are no guarantees.
- Your PR title should be descriptive, and generally start with a subsystem name followed by a
colon. Examples:
- "docs: fix grammar error"
- "http conn man: add new feature"
- Your PR commit message will be used as the commit message when your PR is merged. You should update this field if your PR diverges during review.
- Your PR description should have details on what the PR does. If it fixes an existing issue it should end with "Fixes #XXX".
- If your PR is co-authored or based on an earlier PR from another contributor,
please attribute them with
Co-authored-by: name <[email protected]>
. See GitHub's multiple author guidance for further details. - When all of the tests are passing and all other conditions described herein are satisfied, a maintainer will be assigned to review and merge the PR.
- Once you submit a PR, please do not rebase it. It's much easier to review if subsequent commits are new commits and/or merges. We squash rebase the final merged commit so the number of commits you have in the PR don't matter.
- We expect that once a PR is opened, it will be actively worked on until it is merged or closed. We reserve the right to close PRs that are not making progress. This is generally defined as no changes for 7 days. Obviously PRs that are closed due to lack of activity can be reopened later. Closing stale PRs helps us to keep on top of all of the work currently in flight.
- See OWNERS.md for the current list of maintainers.
- It is generally expected that a senior maintainer should review every PR.
- It is also generally expected that a "domain expert" for the code the PR touches should review the PR. This person does not necessarily need to have commit access.
- The previous two points generally mean that every PR should have two approvals. (Exceptions can be made by the senior maintainers).
- The above rules may be waived for PRs which only update docs or comments, or trivial changes to tests and tools (where trivial is decided by the maintainer in question).
- In general, we should also attempt to make sure that at least one of the approvals is from an organization different from the PR author. E.g., if Lyft authors a PR, at least one approver should be from an organization other than Lyft. This helps us make sure that we aren't putting organization specific shortcuts into the code.
- If there is a question on who should review a PR please discuss in Slack.
- Anyone is welcome to review any PR that they want, whether they are a maintainer or not.
- Please make sure that the PR title, commit message, and description are updated if the PR changes significantly during review.
- Please clean up the title and body before merging. By default, GitHub fills the squash merge title with the original title, and the commit body with every individual commit from the PR. The maintainer doing the merge should make sure the title follows the guidelines above and should overwrite the body with the original commit message from the PR (cleaning it up if necessary) while preserving the PR author's final DCO sign-off.
Envoy ships commit hooks that allow you to auto-generate the DCO signoff line if
it doesn't exist when you run git commit
. Simply navigate to the Envoy project
root and run:
./support/bootstrap
From here, simply commit as normal, and you will see the signoff at the bottom of each commit.
The sign-off is a simple line at the end of the explanation for the patch, which certifies that you wrote it or otherwise have the right to pass it on as an open-source patch. The rules are pretty simple: if you can certify the below (from developercertificate.org):
Developer Certificate of Origin
Version 1.1
Copyright (C) 2004, 2006 The Linux Foundation and its contributors.
660 York Street, Suite 102,
San Francisco, CA 94110 USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this
license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1
By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:
(a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I
have the right to submit it under the open source license
indicated in the file; or
(b) The contribution is based upon previous work that, to the best
of my knowledge, is covered under an appropriate open source
license and I have the right under that license to submit that
work with modifications, whether created in whole or in part
by me, under the same open source license (unless I am
permitted to submit under a different license), as indicated
in the file; or
(c) The contribution was provided directly to me by some other
person who certified (a), (b) or (c) and I have not modified
it.
(d) I understand and agree that this project and the contribution
are public and that a record of the contribution (including all
personal information I submit with it, including my sign-off) is
maintained indefinitely and may be redistributed consistent with
this project or the open source license(s) involved.
then you just add a line to every git commit message:
Signed-off-by: Joe Smith <[email protected]>
using your real name (sorry, no pseudonyms or anonymous contributions.)
You can add the sign off when creating the git commit via git commit -s
.
If you want this to be automatic you can set up some aliases:
git config --add alias.amend "commit -s --amend"
git config --add alias.c "commit -s"
If your PR fails the DCO check, it's necessary to fix the entire commit history in the PR. Best practice is to squash the commit history to a single commit, append the DCO sign-off as described above, and force push. For example, if you have 2 commits in your history:
git rebase -i HEAD^^
(interactive squash + DCO append)
git push origin -f
Note, that in general rewriting history in this way is a hindrance to the review process and this should only be done to correct a DCO mistake.
Sometimes tasks will be stuck in CI and won't be marked as failed, which means
the above command won't work. Should this happen, pushing an empty commit should
re-run all the CI tasks. Consider adding an alias into your .gitconfig
file:
[alias]
kick-ci = !"git commit -s --allow-empty -m 'Kick CI' && git push"
Once you add this alias you can issue the command git kick-ci
and the PR
will be sent back for a retest.