Thank you for considering making contributions to Cosmos-SDK and related repositories!
Contributing to this repo can mean many things such as participated in discussion or proposing code changes. To ensure a smooth workflow for all contributors, the general procedure for contributing has been established:
- Either open or find an issue you'd like to help with
- Participate in thoughtful discussion on that issue
- If you would like to contribute:
- If a the issue is a proposal, ensure that the proposal has been accepted
- Ensure that nobody else has already begun working on this issue, if they have make sure to contact them to collaborate
- If nobody has been assigned the issue and you would like to work on it make a comment on the issue to inform the community of your intentions to begin work
- Follow standard Github best practices: fork the repo, branch from the
HEAD of
master
, make some commits, and submit a PR tomaster
- For core developers working within the cosmos-sdk repo, to ensure a clear
ownership of branches, branches must be named with the convention
{moniker}/{issue#}-branch-name
- For core developers working within the cosmos-sdk repo, to ensure a clear
ownership of branches, branches must be named with the convention
- Be sure to submit the PR in
Draft
mode submit your PR early, even if it's incomplete as this indicates 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
Ready for Review
- Be sure to include a relevant change log entry in the
Unreleased
section ofCHANGELOG.md
(see file for log format)
Note that for very small or blatantly obvious problems (such as typos) it is not required to an open issue to submit a PR, but be aware that for more complex problems/features, if a PR is opened before an adequate design discussion has taken place in a github issue, that PR runs a high likelihood of being rejected.
Take a peek at our coding repo for
overall information on repository workflow and standards. Note, we use make tools
for installing the linting tools.
Other notes:
- Looking for a good place to start contributing? How about checking out some good first issues
- 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 runningmake lint
To accommodate review process we suggest that PRs are categorically broken up. Ideally each PR addresses only a single issue. Additionally, as much as possible code refactoring and cleanup should be submitted as a separate PRs from bugfixes/feature-additions.
All PRs require two Reviews before merge (except docs changes, or variable name-changes which only require one). When reviewing PRs please use the following review explanations:
LGTM
without an explicit approval means that the changes look good, but you haven't pulled down the code, run tests locally and thoroughly reviewed it.Approval
through the GH UI means that you understand the code, documentation/spec is updated in the right places, you have pulled down and tested the code locally. In addition:- You must also think through anything which ought to be included but is not
- You must think through whether any added code could be partially combined (DRYed) with existing code
- You must think through any potential security issues or incentive-compatibility flaws introduced by the changes
- Naming must be consistent with conventions and the rest of the codebase
- Code must live in a reasonable location, considering dependency structures (e.g. not importing testing modules in production code, or including example code modules in production code).
- if you approve of the PR, you are responsible for fixing any of the issues mentioned here and more
- If you sat down with the PR submitter and did a pairing review please note that in the
Approval
, or your PR comments. - If you are only making "surface level" reviews, submit any notes as
Comments
without adding a review.
If you open a PR on the Cosmos SDK, it is mandatory to update the relevant documentation in /docs.
- If your change relates to the core SDK (baseapp, store, ...), please update the docs/cosmos-hub folder and possibly the docs/spec folder.
- If your changes relate specifically to the gaia application (not including modules), please modify the docs/cosmos-hub folder.
- If your changes relate to a module, please update the module's spec in docs/spec. If the module is used by gaia, you might also need to modify docs/cosmos-hub.
- If your changes relate to the core of the CLI or Light-client (not specifically to module's CLI/Rest), please modify the docs/clients folder.
Please note that Go requires code to live under absolute paths, which complicates forking.
While my fork lives at https://github.com/rigeyrigerige/cosmos-sdk
,
the code should never exist at $GOPATH/src/github.com/rigeyrigerige/cosmos-sdk
.
Instead, we use git remote
to add the fork as a new remote for the original repo,
$GOPATH/src/github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk
, 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/cosmos/cosmos-sdk
) git remote rename origin upstream
git remote add origin [email protected]:rigeyrigerige/cosmos-sdk.git
Now origin
refers to my fork and upstream
refers to the Cosmos-SDK version.
So I can git push -u origin master
to update my fork, and make pull requests to Cosmos-SDK from there.
Of course, replace rigeyrigerige
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)
Please don't make Pull Requests to master
.
We use Go 1.11 Modules to manage dependency versions.
The master branch of every Cosmos 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 -v
.
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
.
We expect tests to use require
or assert
rather than t.Skip
or t.Fail
,
unless there is a reason to do otherwise.
When testing a function under a variety of different inputs, we prefer to use
table driven tests.
Table driven test error messages should follow the following format
<desc>, tc #<index>, i #<index>
.
<desc>
is an optional short description of whats failing, tc
is the
index within the table of the testcase that is failing, and i
is when there
is a loop, exactly which iteration of the loop failed.
The idea is you should be able to see the
error message and figure out exactly what failed.
Here is an example check:
<some table>
for tcIndex, tc := range cases {
<some code>
for i := 0; i < tc.numTxsToTest; i++ {
<some code>
require.Equal(t, expectedTx[:32], calculatedTx[:32],
"First 32 bytes of the txs differed. tc #%d, i #%d", tcIndex, i)
User-facing repos should adhere to the trunk based development branching model: https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/.
Libraries need not follow the model strictly, but would be wise to.
The SDK utilizes semantic versioning.
Ensure that you base and target your PR on the master
branch.
All feature additions should be targeted against master
. Bug fixes for an outstanding release candidate
should be targeted against the release candidate branch. Release candidate branches themselves should be the
only pull requests targeted directly against master.
- the latest state of development is on
master
master
must never failmake test
ormake test_cli
master
should not failmake lint
- no
--force
ontomaster
(except when reverting a broken commit, which should seldom happen) - create a development branch either on github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk, or your fork (using
git remote add origin
) - before submitting a pull request, begin
git rebase
on top ofmaster
- ensure pull branch is rebased on
master
- run
make test
andmake test_cli
to ensure that all tests pass - merge pull request
- Start on
master
- Create the release candidate branch
rc/v*
(going forward known as RC) and ensure it's protected against pushing from anyone except the release manager/coordinator- no PRs targeting this branch should be merged unless exceptional circumstances arise
- On the
RC
branch, prepare a new version section in theCHANGELOG.md
- All links must be link-ified:
$ python ./scripts/linkify_changelog.py CHANGELOG.md
- All links must be link-ified:
- Kick off a large round of simulation testing (e.g. 400 seeds for 2k blocks)
- If errors are found during the simulation testing, commit the fixes to
master
and create a newRC
branch (making sure to increment thercN
) - After simulation has successfully completed, create the release branch
(
release/vX.XX.X
) from theRC
branch - Create a PR to
master
to incorporate theCHANGELOG.md
updates - Delete the
RC
branches
At the moment, only a single major release will be supported, so all point releases will be based off of that release.
- start on
vX.XX.X
- checkout a new branch
pre-rc/vX.X.X
- cherry pick the desired changes from
master
- these changes should be small and NON-BREAKING (both API and state machine)
- add entries to CHANGELOG.md and remove corresponding pending log entries
- checkout a new branch
rc/vX.X.X
based off ofvX.XX.X
- create a PR merging
pre-rc/vX.X.X
intorc/vX.X.X
- run tests and simulations (noted in Release Procedure)
- after tests and simulation have successfully completed, create the release branch
release/vX.XX.X
from theRC
branch - delete the
pre-rc/vX.X.X
andRC
branches - create a PR into
master
containing ONLY the CHANGELOG.md updates - tag and release
release/vX.XX.X