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Contributing to lakeFS

Thank you for your interest in contributing to our project. Whether it’s a bug report, new feature, correction, or additional documentation, we greatly value feedback and contributions from our community.

Please read through this document before submitting any issues or pull requests to ensure that we have all the necessary information to effectively respond to your bug report or contribution.

Don’t know where to start? Reach out on the #dev channel on our Slack and we will help you get started. We also recommend this free series about contributing to OSS projects.

Getting Started

Before you get started, we kindly ask that you:

  • Check out the code of conduct.
  • Sign the lakeFS CLA when making your first pull request (individual / corporate)
  • Submit any security issues directly to security@treeverse.io.
  • Contributions should have an associated GitHub issue.
  • Before making major contributions, please reach out to us on the #dev channel on Slack. We will make sure no one else is working on the same feature.

Setting up an Environment

This section was tested on macOS and Linux (Fedora 32, Ubuntu 20.04) - Your mileage may vary

Our Go release workflow holds the Go and Node.js versions we currently use under go-version and node-version compatibly. The Java workflows use Maven 3.8.x (but any recent version of Maven should work).

  1. Install the required dependencies for your OS:
    1. Git
    2. GNU make (probably best to install from your OS package manager such as apt or brew)
    3. Docker
    4. Go
    5. Node.js & npm
    6. Maven to build and test Spark client codes.
    7. Java 8
    8. Optional - PostgreSQL 11 (useful for running and debugging locally)
    9. Optional - Rust & Cargo (useful for building the Rust SDK)
    10. Optional - Buf CLI (only needed if you like to update Protocol Buffer files)

  2. Clone the repository from GitHub.

    This gives you read-only access to the repository. To contribute, see the next section.

  3. Build the project:

    make build

    Note: make build won’t work for Windows users.

  4. Make sure tests are passing. The following should not return any errors:

    make test

Before creating a pull request

  1. Review this document in full.
  2. Make sure there’s an open issue on GitHub that this pull request addresses, and that it isn’t labeled x/wontfix.
  3. Fork the lakeFS repository.
  4. If you’re adding new functionality, create a new branch named feature/<DESCRIPTIVE NAME>.
  5. If you’re fixing a bug, create a new branch named fix/<DESCRIPTIVE NAME>-<ISSUE NUMBER>.

Testing your change

Once you’ve made the necessary changes to the code, make sure the tests pass:

Run unit tests:

make test

Check that linting rules are passing.

make checks-validator

You will need GNU diff to run this. On the macOS it can be installed with brew install diffutils

lakeFS uses go fmt as a style guide for Go code.

Run system-tests:

make system-tests

Want to dive deeper into our system tests infrastructure? Need to debug the tests? Follow this documentation.

Submitting a pull request

Open a GitHub pull request with your change. The PR description should include a brief explanation of your change. You should also mention the related GitHub issue. If the issue should be automatically closed after the merge, please link it to the PR.

After submitting your pull request, GitHub Actions will automatically run tests on your changes and make sure that your updated code builds and runs on Go 1.19.x.

Check back shortly after submitting your pull request to make sure that your code passes these checks. If any of the checks come back with a red X, then do your best to address the errors.

A developer from our team will review your pull request, and may request some changes to it. After the request is approved, it will be merged to our main branch.

Documentation

Any contribution to the docs, whether it is in conjunction with a code contribution or as a standalone, is appreciated.

Documentation of features and changes in behaviour should be included in the pull request. You can create separate pull requests for documentation changes only.

To learn how to contribute to the lakeFS documentation see this page, which also includes details on how to build the documentation locally.

CHANGELOG.md

Any user-facing change should be labeled with include-changelog. The PR title should contain a concise summary of the feature or fix and the description should have the GitHub issue number. When we publish a new version of lakeFS, we will add this to the relevant version section of the changelog. If the change should not be included in the changelog, label it with exclude-changelog.

User-Facing Changes Examples

  1. UI/UX modifications: Changes to the layout, color scheme, or navigation structure.
  2. New features: Adding functionality that users can directly interact with, unless defined as internal.
  3. Configuration changes: Updates to settings that users can adjust.
  4. Performance improvements: Enhancements that noticeably speed up the application.
  5. Bug fixes.
  6. Security updates: Changes that address vulnerabilities or privacy concerns.

Non-User-Facing Changes:

  1. Code refactoring: Restructuring the codebase without changing its external behavior.
  2. Backend optimizations: Improvements to server-side processes that don’t noticeably affect performance.
  3. Database schema changes: Modifications to the data structure that don’t alter the user interface and do not require data migration.
  4. Development tooling updates: Changes to build processes or development environments.
  5. Internal API: Adding/Altering APIs tagged as internal.
  6. Documentation updates.
  7. Imported libraries: Updates to third-party libraries that don’t introduce security updates.