besu/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Pantheon

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

Welcome to the Pantheon 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

Issue and Pull Request Labels

Code of Conduct

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

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.

• Pantheon documentation
• Gitter

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. Fill in the issue_template.md, the information it asks for helps us resolve issues faster.

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 the Debugging 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 GitHub issues.
Issues should provide the following information by filling in the issue_template.md.

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

• Use a clear and descriptive title 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 Pantheon, 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 Markdown code blocks.
• 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 pantheon -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 pantheon 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. Fill in the issue_template.md, including the steps that you imagine you would take if the feature you're requesting existed.

Before Submitting An Enhancement Suggestion

• Check the Debugging 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 GitHub issues. Issues should provide the following information by filling in the issue_template.md and providing 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. Include copy/pasteable snippets which you use in those examples, as Markdown code blocks.
• Describe the current behavior and explain which behavior you expected to see instead and why.
• Include screenshots which help you demonstrate the steps.
• 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 pantheon -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:

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

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 and documentation 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 using a clear commit message.
6. Test your changes locally before pushing to ensure that what you are proposing is not breaking another part of the software.
   • For code changes, 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.
   • For doc changes, displaying the doc with MkDocs in a preview mode enables you to check the rendering as explained in the MkDocs And Markdown Guide.
7. Push your changes to your remote fork (usually labeled as origin).
8. Create a pull-request (PR) on the Pantheon repository.
9. Add labels to identify the type of your PR. For example, if your PR only changes documentation, add the "documentation" label. If it fixes a bug, add the "bug" label.
10. 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.
11. Make any required changes on your contribution from the reviewers feedback. Make the changes, commit to your branch, and push to your remote fork.
12. 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 Pantheon ! 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.

Important The libsodium library must be installed to run ./gradlew integrationTest.

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 this post: How to Write a Git Commit Message.

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

1. Complete the CLA, as described in CLA.md.
2. Follow all instructions in PULL-REQUEST-TEMPLATE.md.
3. Include appropriate test coverage. Testing is 100% automated. There is no such thing as a manual test.
4. Follow the Style Guides.
5. After you submit your pull request, verify that all status checks are passing.

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.

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.

Documentation Style Guide

For documentation, we have documentation guidelines and examples. These rules are not automatically enforced but are recommended to make the documentation consistent and enhance the user experience.

Also have a look at our MKDocs Markdown guide if you're not famililar with MarkDown syntax. We also have a number of extensions that are available in the Pantheon documentation described in this guide.

Git Commit Messages & Pull Request Messages

• Use the present tense ("Add feature" not "Added feature")
• Use the imperative mood ("Move cursor to..." not "Moves cursor to...")
• Provide a summary on the first line with more details on additional lines as needed
• Reference issues and pull requests liberally

Issue and Pull Request Labels

Type of Issue and Issue State

Label name	Description
enhancement	Feature requests.
bug	Confirmed bugs or reports that are very likely to be bugs.
help wanted	The core team would appreciate help from the community in resolving these issues.
good first issue	Less complex issues which would be good first issues to work on for users who want to contribute.
info needed	More information needs to be collected about these problems or feature requests (e.g. steps to reproduce).
needs reproduction	Likely bugs, but haven't been reliably reproduced.
blocked	Issues blocked on other issues.
duplicate	Issues which are duplicates of other issues, i.e. they have been reported before.
wontfix	The core team has decided not to fix these issues for now, either because they're working as intended or for some other reason.
invalid	Issues which aren't valid (e.g. user errors).
do we want this?	Seeking stakeholder consensus on proposed feature.

Topic Categories

Label name	Description
windows	Related to running on Windows.
linux	Related to running on Linux.
mac	Related to running on macOS.
documentation	Related to any type of documentation
performance	Related to performance.
security	Related to security.
api	Related to public APIs.

Pull Request Labels

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