- Contributing Guide
Welcome! We are glad that you want to contribute to our project! 💖
As you get started, you are in the best position to give us feedback on areas of our project that we need help with including:
- Problems found during setting up a new developer environment
- Gaps in our Quickstart Guide or documentation
- Bugs in our automation scripts
If anything doesn't make sense, or doesn't work when you run it, please open a bug report and let us know!
Thanks to the maintainers of the CNCF Project Template Repository for the great work they have done.
There are a number of ways to participate in this project. As the project evolves and grows, we will define a more formal governance model. For now, this document describes various ways community members might participate.
A Community Participant engages with the project and its community, contributing their time, thoughts, etc. Community participants are usually users who have stopped being anonymous and started being active in project discussions.
A Contributor contributes directly to the project. Contributions need not be code. People at the Contributor level may be new contributors, or they may only contribute occasionally.
Maintainers are established contributors who are responsible for the entire project. As such, they have the ability to approve PRs against any area of the project, and are expected to participate in making decisions about the strategy and priorities of the project.
We welcome many different types of contributions including:
- New features
- Builds, CI/CD
- Bug fixes
- Documentation
- Issue Triage
- Communications / Social Media / Blog Posts
- Release management
We have good first issues for new contributors and help wanted issues suitable for any contributor. good first issue has extra information to help you make your first contribution. help wanted are issues suitable for someone who isn't a core maintainer and is good to move onto after your first pull request.
Sometimes there won’t be any issues with these labels. That’s ok! There is likely still something for you to work on. If you want to contribute but you don’t know where to start or have an idea, feel free to open a new issue in Github for brainstorming.
Once you see an issue that you'd like to work on, please post a comment saying that you want to work on it. Something like "I want to work on this" is fine.
The best way to reach us with a question when contributing is to ask on the original github issue.
Generally a comment should be resolved by the one who leaves the comment.
For PR authors, if a comment is not left by you, please do not resolve it even after applying the changes suggested by it. This is to make sure that the changes do address the concern of the PR reviewer as there could be misunderstanding between PR authors and PR reviewers. However, if the PR reviewer is not responding to the comment for whatever reason, the project maintainers can help resolve the comment to unblock the PR author.
For PR reviewers, after a comment left by you is acted upon, it is encouraged to either reply to it or resolve it in a timely manner to unblock the PR author because all the comments are required to be resolved before a PR can be merged. For project maintainers, please target handling unresolved comments within 2 working days.
We feel spelling these norms out is better than assuming them, and we all acknowledge life happens and these are guidelines, not strict rules.
After a PR is merged, please check if the corresponding build is passing. If not, please create a new PR to revert the problematic PR. We should do that before fixing the root cause so that we can unblock other PRs first. However, if the failure seems unrelated to your PR, please check if there's an existing issue regarding the flakiness (example). If there's not, feel free to create one to report the newly found flakiness.
This is needed because we use Loose instead of Strict regarding branch protection. In other words, if there is a bug that only exists after multiple PRs are merged, then there's a chance for us to have the bug in main: PR1's checks passed → PR2's checks passed → Merge PR2 → Now PR1 becomes outdated, and CI would fail if we update the PR branch and run the checks again, but since we're using Loose, we can just merge it → bug in main. Given the deficiency mentioned above, we still want to go with Loose because it streamlines developer UX tremendously: if we use Strict, then after a PR is merged, all the other open PRs will need to merge the latest main into the PR branches before they can be merged, which is not scalable.
This section describes how one can develop Finch CLI locally, build it, and then run it to test out the changes. The design ensures that the local development environment is isolated from the installation (i.e., we should not need to run make install to do local development).
We use golangci-lint.
To integrate it into your IDE, please check out the official documentation.
For more details, see .golangci.yaml and the lint target in Makefile.
Please note that this section uses Homebrew to install dependencies, which has to be installed before continuing to the next steps.
Before building Finch, install dependencies required to build the project binaries using Homebrew:
brew install go lz4 automake autoconf libtool yqNote that you may need to add the following to the .profile file of your shell if which libtool does not return the one installed by Homebrew. The one that comes with macOS is too old for use with Finch.
export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/libtool/libexec/gnubin:$PATH"The easiest way to install dependencies on Windows is through the use of winget, which comes pre-installed on modern versions of Windows. Follow the instructions in the link if typing winget in your Terminal does not work out of the box.
After ensuring winget is working, running the following command will setup all of the pre-requisites needed to build Finch on Windows:
winget install -e --id GnuWin32.Make
winget install -e --id Git.Git
winget install -e --id=GoLang.Go
winget install -e --id MikeFarah.yqIn order to actually run Finch on Windows, you will need to also configure WSL 2 (the runfinch.com website has detailed instructions):
wsl --update
wsl --install UbuntuPlease note that this section does not have exhaustive instructions for every single Linux distribution and package manager, but it does have a "generic" installation method. More distribution specific contributions are welcome.
sudo yum install golang zlib-static containerd nerdctl cni-plugins iptablesgolang: used to build go packageszlib-static: used to build soci, as part of the included finch.spec file in ./contrib/packaging/rpmcontainerd,nerdctl,cni-plugins,iptables: runtime dependencies
- Install go following instructions here
- Install the latest nerdctl-full bundle from GitHub
- If building SOCI, follow the instructions here to setup the dependencies
- Create the expected directory structure by inspecting the finch.spec file
Clone the repo and make sure to include the submodules by adding --recurse-submodules. For example:
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/runfinch/finch.gitIf the repo is already cloned, but the submodules are not pulled yet, the following command can be run to pull all of the submodules without re-cloning:
git submodule update --init --recursiveIf you are building on Windows from a fork of finch, you may need to fetch upstream tags in order to build:
git fetch <upstream finch remote name> --tagsAfter cloning the repo, run the following command to make subsequent git pull to also update submodules to the versions specified in the upstream branch.
git config submodule.recurse trueThen run make to build the binary. The binary in _output can be directly used. E.g. initializing the vm and display the version
./_output/bin/finch vm init
./_output/bin/finch versionYou can run make install to make finch binary globally accessible.
You can run ./contrib/packaging/rpm/build.sh --local to install Finch globally.
NOTE: If your build environment experiences issues with downloading dependencies from the Go proxy servers, then you may want to set the environment variable export GOPROXY=direct
To run unit test locally, please run make test-unit. Please make sure to run the unit tests before pushing the changes.
Ideally each go file should have a test file ending with _test.go, and we should have as much test coverage as we can.
To check unit test coverage, run make coverage under root finch-cli root directory.
To run e2e tests locally, please run make test-e2e. Make sure to run the e2e tests or add new e2e tests before pushing changes.
The VM instance is not expected to exist before running e2e tests, please make sure to remove it before going into next step:
./_output/bin/finch vm stop
./_output/bin/finch vm removeThe Finch project enforces commits to be written with conventional commit messages in order to be merged. Conventional commits provide a simple set of types to assign commits based on the intention of the commit. A full list of allowed types can be found in the conventional-commit-types repository.
For example:
fix: my fix message
This is the body of my fix commit
Conventional commits can be given more granularity when written in the format of <type>(<scope>):<message>.
When authoring commits that target a specific platform (e.g. macOS vs. Windows), we require that scope to be
the name of the platform, e.g.:
feat(Windows): my Windows feature
or
fix(macOS): bug fix specific to macOS
Otherwise, the <scope> is optional.
Licensing is important to open source projects. It provides some assurances that the software will continue to be available based under the terms that the author(s) desired. We require that contributors sign off on commits submitted to our project's repositories. The Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) is a way to certify that you wrote and have the right to contribute the code you are submitting to the project.
You sign-off by adding the following to your commit messages. Your sign-off must match the git user and email associated with the commit.
This is my commit message
Signed-off-by: Your Name <your.name@example.com>
Git has a -s command line option to do this automatically:
git commit -s -m 'This is my commit message'If you forgot to do this and have not yet pushed your changes to the remote repository, you can amend your commit with the sign-off by running
git commit --amend -s --no-editWhen you submit your pull request, or you push new commits to it, our automated systems will run some checks on your new code. We require that your pull request passes these checks, and you can run the checks locally to iterate faster (you may need to configure the environment first):
make test-unit
make test-e2e
make lintWe also have more criteria than just that before we can accept and merge it. We recommend that you check the following things locally before you submit your code:
If your change adds any new commands or parameters (for example, if adding a new --example flag to finch vm stop), ensure that ./_output/bin/finch gen-docs generate -p ./docs/cmd is run and the result is added to a commit in the PR branch. PR #938 is a good example of when documentation had to be added for a new command parameter. Another case when this may happen is when a nerdctl command or parameter is modified.
make test-unit
For each unit test case (i.e., in both TestXXX and the function passed to t.Run), t.Parallel should be added by default. It should only be skipped under special situations (e.g., T.Setenv is used in that test).
Rationale:
- Each unit test case should be independent from each other, so they should be able to be executed in parallel.
- Adding a
t.Parallelis not much effort as all the underlying details are handled by Go std lib. t.Parallelhelps us ensure that the test cases are truly independent from each other.- The running time can (theoretically) only go down.
Keeping a good unit test coverage will be part of pull request review. You can run make coverage to self-check the coverage.
make test-e2e
See test-e2e section in Makefile for more reference.
In this repository, there are two suites of E2E tests: container tests and vm tests.
If the e2e test scenarios you are going to contribute
- are in generic container development workflow
- can be shared by finch-core by replacing test subject from "finch" to "limactl ..."
- E.g.: pull, push, build, run, etc.
they belong with the container tests. Implement them in common-tests repo and then import them in ./e2e/container/container_test.go in finch CLI and ./e2e/e2e_test.go in finch-core. The detailed flow can be found here.
Otherwise, it means that the scenarios are specific to finch CLI (e.g., version, VM lifecycle, etc.), and belong with the vm tests. You should implement them under ./e2e/vm/ (e.g., ./e2e/vm/version_test.go) and import them in ./e2e/vm/vm_test.go.
If you want to run just one of the two suites, append the suite name to the end of the Makefile target:
make test-e2e-container
make test-e2e-vmTo save time while developing e2e tests, use the Focus decorator while running tests, but be sure to remove it before PR-ing your changes.
Keep file names to one word if possible (e.g., avoid stuttering with package name: prefer thing/factory.go over thing/thing_factory.go). If there have to be more than one words, use underscores as separators. Do not use hyphens or camelCase.
Rationale: It's more readable (i.e., complicateddistirbutedsystem vs complicated_distributed_system). Furthermore, the practical reason to avoid underscores as separators is that the suffix may later become either an OS or an architecture, but we think that the potential risk is outweighed by the readability gain.
To add more context, there are some public discussions on this, but there is no consensus yet.
If you have write access to the repository, and all the checks have passed, feel free to merge the PR.
We use release-please to automate the release process.
Detailed steps:
- Restrict who can push to matching branches to only you in the branch protection rule of
main. - Ensure that all the checks are passing for the latest commit on
main. This is needed becausemaincould contain a bug (more info:Loosebranch protection in After Merge), while we want no bugs in an official release. - Merge the
release-pleasePR (example). - Remove the pusher restriction in the first step.