besu/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Besu

👍🎉 First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute! 🎉👍

Welcome to the Besu repository! The following is a set of guidelines for contributing to this repo and its packages. These are mostly guidelines, not rules. Use your best judgment, and feel free to propose changes to this document in a pull request.

Table Of Contents

Code of Conduct

I just have a quick question

How To Contribute

• Reporting Bugs
• Suggesting Enhancements
• Your First Contribution
• Pull Requests
• Code Reviews

Style Guides

• Java Style Guide
• Coding Conventions
• Git Commit Messages & Pull Request Messages

Pull Request Labels

Code of Conduct

This project and everyone participating in it is governed by the Besu Code of Conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. Please report unacceptable behavior to private@pegasys.tech.

The Hyperledger Code of Conduct also applies to participants in this project.

Governance

Hyperledger Besu is managed under an open governance model as described in the HyperLedger charter. Hyperledger Besu is lead by a set of maintainers.

I just have a quick question

Note: Please don't file an issue to ask a question. You'll get faster results by using the resources below.

• Besu documentation
• Rocketchat

How To Contribute

Reporting Bugs

This section guides you through submitting a bug report. Following these guidelines helps maintainers and the community understand your report, reproduce the behavior, and find related reports.

Before creating bug reports, please check the before-submitting-a-bug-report checklist as you might find out that you don't need to create one. When you are creating a bug report, please include as many details as possible.

Note: If you find a Closed issue that seems like it is the same thing that you're experiencing, open a new issue and include a link to the original issue in the body of your new one.

Before Submitting A Bug Report

• Confirm the problem is reproducible in the latest version of the software
• Check Besu documentation. You might be able to find the cause of the problem and fix things yourself.
• Perform a cursory search of project issues to see if the problem has already been reported. If it has and the issue is still open, add a comment to the existing issue instead of opening a new one.

How Do I Submit A (Good) Bug Report?

Bugs are tracked as Jira issues.

Explain the problem and include additional details to help maintainers reproduce the problem:

• Use a clear and descriptive summary for the issue to identify the problem.
• Describe the exact steps which reproduce the problem in as many details as possible. For example, start by explaining how you started Besu, e.g. which command exactly you used in the terminal, or how you started it otherwise.
• Provide specific examples to demonstrate the steps. Include links to files or GitHub projects, or copy/pasteable snippets, which you use in those examples. If you're providing snippets in the issue, use backticks (```) to format the code snippets.
• Describe the behavior you observed after following the steps and point out what exactly is the problem with that behavior.
• Explain which behavior you expected to see instead and why.
• Include screenshots which show you following the described steps and clearly demonstrate the problem.

Provide more context by answering these questions:

• Did the problem start happening recently (e.g. after updating to a new version of the software) or was this always a problem?
• If the problem started happening recently, can you reproduce the problem in an older version of the software? What's the most recent version in which the problem doesn't happen?
• Can you reliably reproduce the issue? If not, provide details about how often the problem happens and under which conditions it normally happens.

Include details about your configuration and environment:

• Which version of the software are you using? You can get the exact version by running besu -v in your terminal.
• What OS & Version are you running?
  • For Linux - What kernel are you running? You can get the exact version by running uname -a in your terminal.
• Are you running in a virtual machine? If so, which VM software are you using and which operating systems and versions are used for the host and the guest?
• Are you running in a docker container? If so, what version of docker?
• Are you running in a a Cloud? If so, which one, and what type/size of VM is it?
• What version of Java are you running? You can get the exact version by looking at the besu logfile during startup.

Suggesting Enhancements

This section guides you through submitting an enhancement suggestion, including completely new features and minor improvements to existing functionality or documentation changes.

Following these guidelines helps maintainers and the community understand your suggestion and find related suggestions.

Before creating enhancement suggestions, please check the before-submitting-an-enhancement-suggestion list as you might find out that you don't need to create one.

When you are creating an enhancement suggestion, please include as many details as possible.

Before Submitting An Enhancement Suggestion

• Check the Besu documentation. You might be able to find the cause of the problem and fix things yourself.
• Perform a cursory search of project issues to see if the problem has already been reported. If it has and the issue is still open, add a comment to the existing issue instead of opening a new one.

How Do I Submit A (Good) Enhancement Suggestion?

Enhancement suggestions are tracked as Jira issues. Provide the following information:

• Use a clear and descriptive title for the issue to identify the suggestion.
• Provide a step-by-step description of the suggested enhancement in as many details as possible.
• Provide specific examples to demonstrate the steps. If you're providing code snippets in the issue, use backticks (````) to format the code snippets..
• Describe the current behavior and explain which behavior you expected to see instead and why.
• Include screenshots which help you demonstrate the steps where possible.
• Explain why this enhancement would be useful to most users.
• Does this enhancement exist in other clients?
• Specify which version of the software you're using. You can get the exact version by running besu -v in your terminal.
• Specify the name and version of the OS you're using.

Your First Contribution

Start by looking through the 'good first issue' and 'help wanted' labeled issues on the Jira dashboard:

• [Good First Issue][search-label-good-first-issue] - issues which should only require a few lines of code or documentation, and a test or two.
• [Help wanted issues][search-label-help-wanted] - issues which are a bit more involved than good first issue issues.

When you've identified an issue you'd like to work on, ping us on Rocketchat and we'll assign it to you.

Contribution Workflow

The codebase and documentation are maintained using the same "contributor workflow" where everyone without exception contributes changes proposals using "pull-requests".

This facilitates social contribution, easy testing, and peer review.

To contribute changes, use the following workflow:

1. Fork the repository.
2. Clone your fork to your computer.
3. Create a topic branch and name it appropriately. Starting the branch name with the issue number is a good practice and a reminder to fix only one issue in a Pull-Request (PR)._
4. Make your changes adhering to the coding conventions described below. In general a commit serves a single purpose and diffs should be easily comprehensible. For this reason do not mix any formatting fixes or code moves with actual code changes.
5. Commit your changes see How to Write a Git Commit Message article by Chris Beams.
6. Test your changes locally before pushing to ensure that what you are proposing is not breaking another part of the software. Running the ./gradlew clean check test command locally will help you to be confident that your changes will pass CI tests once pushed as a Pull Request.
7. Push your changes to your remote fork (usually labeled as origin).
8. Create a pull-request (PR) on the Besu repository. If the PR addresses an existing Jira issue, include the issue number in the PR title in square brackets (for example, [BESU-2374]).
9. Add labels to identify the type of your PR. For example, if your PR is not ready to validate, add the "work-in-progress" label. If it fixes a bug, add the "bug" label.
10. If the PR address an existing Jira issue, comment in the Jira issue with the PR number.
11. Ensure your changes are reviewed. Select the reviewers you would like to review your PR. If you don't know who to choose, simply select the reviewers proposed by GitHub or leave blank.
12. Make any required changes on your contribution from the reviewers feedback. Make the changes, commit to your branch, and push to your remote fork.
13. When your PR is validated, all tests passed and your branch has no conflicts with the target branch, you can "squash and merge" your PR and you're done. You contributed to Besu! Thanks !

Architectural Best Practices

Questions on architectural best practices will be guided by the principles set forth in Effective Java by Joshua Bloch

Automated Test coverage

All code submissions must be accompanied by appropriate automated tests. The goal is to provide confidence in the code’s robustness, while avoiding redundant tests.

Pull Requests

The process described here has several goals:

• Maintain Product quality
• Fix problems that are important to users
• Engage the community in working toward the best possible product
• Enable a sustainable system for maintainers to review contributions
• Further explanation on PR & commit messages can be found in the How to Write a Git Commit Message article by Chris Beams.

Please follow these steps to have your contribution considered by the approvers:

1. Ensure all commits have a Sign-off for DCO, as described in DCO.md.
2. Follow all instructions in PULL-REQUEST-TEMPLATE.md.
3. Include appropriate test coverage. Testing is 100% automated. All submissions must be testable in an automated fashion.
4. Follow the Style Guides.
5. After you submit your pull request, verify that all status checks are passing.

What Makes A Good Pull Request?

The following guidelines, based on Hyperledger Fabic's contribution guidelines will help ensure that your pull request gets promptly reviewed.

One Pull Request, One Change

• This limits the surface area of the change, and makes it easier to identify root causes when issues arise.

Link to JIRA

• When submitting your PR, include the JIRA ticket's link in the description and number in the title (i.e. [BESU-99] My Awesome PR), this helps provide more context on your work and auto-update the JIRA ticket to include a link to your PR.

Minimize LOCs per PR

• PRs get near exponentially longer to review as the number of lines of code increase. Ideally, try and keep your changes to under 300 LOC. If that is not possible, try and break up your PR into smaller ones for reviewers to review sequentially.
• One way to do this if, for some reason, the change has to all go in the codebase at once, is to have a PR open on the Besu repository linking to smaller PRs on your Besu fork.

Write Meaningful Commit Messages

• As mentioned above, your commit title should include the JIRA ticket number (i.e. [BESU-99]) while the description should link to the jira ticket. Please include a comprehensive description of the changes in your commit description.

Be Responsive

• Don't let a PR sit idle with unaddressed comments until it gets to a point where you need to rebase the whole thing. If you are pausing your work on an issue, please indicate it in the PR comments.

What if the status checks are failing?

• If a status check is failing, and you believe that the failure is unrelated to your change, please leave a comment on the pull request explaining why you believe the failure is unrelated. A maintainer will re-run the status check for you.
• If we conclude that the failure was a false positive, then we will open an issue to track that problem with our status check suite.

Code Review

While the prerequisites above must be satisfied prior to having your pull request reviewed, the reviewer(s) may ask you to complete additional design work, tests, or other changes before your pull request can be ultimately accepted. Please refer to Code Reviews.

Style Guides

Java Code Style Guide

We use Google's Java coding conventions for the project. To reformat code, run:

./gradlew spotlessApply

Code style will be checked automatically during a build.

Coding Conventions

We have a set of coding conventions to which we try to adhere. These are not strictly enforced during the build, but should be adhered to and called out in code reviews.

Pull Request Labels

Pull Request Labels

Label name	Description
[work-in-progress][search-label-work-in-progress]	Pull requests which are still being worked on, more changes will follow.
[requires-changes][search-label-requires-changes]	Pull requests which need to be updated based on review comments and then reviewed again.
[needs engineering approval][search-label-needs-engineering-approval]	Pull requests which need to be approved from a technical person, mainly documentation PRs.