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Contributing

Thank you for your interest in contributing to Tenderdash! Before contributing, it may be helpful to understand the goal of the project. The goal of Tenderdash 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 Tenderdash or a potential fork. When targeting Tenderdash, the following process leads to the best chance of landing changes in the development branch.

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 in the Tenderdash repo. 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.

How to pick a number for the ADR?

Find the largest existing ADR number and bump it by 1.

When the problem as well as proposed solution are well understood, changes should start with a draft pull request against the development branch (latest vMAJOR.MINOR-dev). 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 the development branch.
  • Maintainers have the necessary context in order to support and review contributions.

Code Style

Follow the conventions in STYLE_GUIDE.md for Go code structure, comments, tests, and errors.

Dependencies

We use go modules to manage dependencies.

The development branch (latest vMAJOR.MINOR-dev) should build cleanly with go get, which means dependencies should be kept up-to-date 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.

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. go get -u github.com/tendermint/go-amino@<version>.

Protobuf

We use Protocol Buffers along with gogoproto to generate code for use across Tenderdash.

To generate proto stubs, lint, and check protos for breaking changes, you will need to install buf and gogoproto. Then, from the root of the repository, run:

# Lint all of the .proto files in proto/tendermint
make proto-lint

# Check if any of your local changes (prior to committing to the Git repository)
# are breaking
make proto-check-breaking

# Generate Go code from the .proto files in proto/tendermint
make proto-gen

To automatically format .proto files, you will need clang-format installed. Once installed, you can run:

make proto-format

Visual Studio Code

If you are a VS Code user, you may want to add the following to your .vscode/settings.json:

{
  "protoc": {
    "options": [
      "--proto_path=${workspaceRoot}/proto",
      "--proto_path=${workspaceRoot}/third_party/proto"
    ]
  }
}

Release Notes

Release notes are generated from commit messages by scripts/release.sh. Use clear conventional commit summaries so the release tooling can assemble accurate notes; CHANGELOG_PENDING.md is no longer maintained.

Branching Model and Release

Tenderdash maintains two primary branches:

  • master for the latest stable release.
  • The highest-versioned vMAJOR.MINOR-dev branch for active development.

Find the current development branch with:

git branch -r --list 'origin/v[0-9]*-dev' --sort=-version:refname | head -1

Release tags are cut from master. We only maintain master and the current development branch. Changes merge into the development branch first; master receives cherry-picked release-critical fixes and release updates.

Note all pull requests should be squash merged. 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 the development branch (latest vMAJOR.MINOR-dev), which must keep CI green (build, lint, and tests). Never force push the development branch, unless fixing broken git history (which we rarely do anyways).

To begin contributing, create a development branch either on github.com/dashpay/tenderdash, or your fork (using git remote add origin).

Make changes and keep your branch updated with the latest development branch. Ensure CI is green; run make build, make lint, and go test -race -timeout=5m ./... locally as needed. (Since pull requests are squash-merged, either git rebase or git merge is fine.) When opening a PR, fill in every section of .github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md.

If a change needs to land in the latest stable release, coordinate with the maintainers and open a follow-up PR against master after the development branch merge. Follow-up PRs should cherry-pick the relevant commit(s) and are typically reserved for release-critical fixes.

Once you have submitted a pull request label the pull request with either R:minor, if the change should be included in the next minor release, or R:major, if the change is meant for a major release.

Sometimes (often!) pull requests get out-of-date with the development branch, as other people merge different pull requests to the development branch. It is our convention that pull request authors are responsible for updating their branches with the development branch. (This also means that you shouldn't update someone else's branch for them; even if it seems like you're doing them a favor, you may be interfering with their git flow in some way!)

Merging Pull Requests

It is also our convention that authors merge their own pull requests, when possible. External contributors may not have the necessary permissions to do this, in which case, a member of the core team will merge the pull request once it's been approved.

Before merging a pull request:

  • Ensure pull branch is up-to-date with the development branch (GitHub won't let you merge without this!)
  • Ensure CI is green
  • Squash merge pull request

Git Commit Style

We use conventional commit format for commit and PR titles. Follow the Conventional Commits specification and use common types like feat, fix, docs, refactor, test, and chore. Scopes should describe the affected package or subsystem (e.g., cmd/debug). Write concise commits that follow type(scope): summary on the first line; optional body and footer sections may include context or references. For example,

fix(cmd/debug): execute p.Signal only when p is not nil

[potentially longer description in the body]

Fixes #nnnn

Each PR should have one commit once it lands on the development branch; this can be accomplished by using the "squash and merge" button on Github. Be sure to edit your commit message, though!

Testing

Unit tests

Unit tests are located in _test.go files as directed by the Go testing package. If you're adding or removing a function, please check there's a TestType_Method test for it.

Run: go test -race -timeout=5m ./...

To run a single package's tests, use go test -race -timeout=5m ./dash/quorum/....

Integration tests

Integration tests are also located in _test.go files. What differentiates them is a more complicated setup, which usually involves setting up two or more components.

Run: make test_integrations

End-to-end tests

End-to-end tests are used to verify a fully integrated Tenderdash network.

See README for details.

Run:

cd test/e2e && \
  make && \
  ./build/runner -f networks/ci.toml

Model-based tests (ADVANCED)

NOTE: if you're just submitting your first PR, you won't need to touch these most probably (99.9%).

For components, that have been formally verified using TLA+, it may be possible to generate tests using a combination of the Apalache Model Checker and tendermint-rs testgen util.

Now, I know there's a lot to take in. If you want to learn more, check out this video by Andrey Kupriyanov & Igor Konnov.

At the moment, we have model-based tests for the light client, located in the ./light/mbt directory.

Run: cd light/mbt && go test

Fuzz tests (ADVANCED)

NOTE: if you're just submitting your first PR, you won't need to touch these most probably (99.9%).

Fuzz tests can be found inside the ./test/fuzz directory. See README.md for details.

Run: cd test/fuzz && make fuzz-{PACKAGE-COMPONENT}

Jepsen tests (ADVANCED)

NOTE: if you're just submitting your first PR, you won't need to touch these most probably (99.9%).

Jepsen tests are used to verify the linearizability property of the Tendermint consensus. They are located in a separate repository -> https://github.com/tendermint/jepsen. Please refer to its README for more information.

RPC Testing

If you contribute to the RPC endpoints it's important to document your changes in the Openapi file.

To test your changes you must install nodejs and run:

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

WARNING: these are currently broken due to https://github.com/apiaryio/dredd not supporting complete OpenAPI 3.

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