CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Kuma

Hello, and welcome! Whether you are looking for help, trying to report a bug, thinking about getting involved in the project or about to submit a patch, this document is for you! Its intent is to be both an entry point for newcomers to the community (with various technical backgrounds), and a guide/reference for contributors and maintainers.

Where to seek help?

Slack is the main chat channel used by the community and the maintainers of this project. If you do not have an existing account, please follow this link to sign up for free.

Please avoid opening GitHub issues for general questions or help, as those should be reserved for actual bug reports. The Kuma community is welcoming and more than willing to assist you on Slack!

Where to report bugs?

Feel free to submit an issue on the GitHub repository, we would be grateful to hear about it! Please make sure to respect the GitHub issue template, and include:

1. A summary of the issue
2. A list of steps to reproduce the issue
3. The version of Kuma you encountered the issue with
4. Your Kuma configuration, or the parts that are relevant to your issue

If you wish, you are more than welcome to propose a patch to fix the issue! See the Submit a patch section for more information on how to best do so.

Where to submit feature requests?

You can submit an issue for feature requests. Please add as much detail as you can when doing so.

You are also welcome to propose patches adding new features. See the section on Submitting a patch for details.

Contributing

We welcome contributions of all kinds, you do not need to code to be helpful! All of the following tasks are noble and worthy contributions that you can make without coding:

• Reporting a bug (see the report bugs section)
• Helping other members of the community on Slack
• Fixing a typo in the code
• Fixing a typo in the documentation at https://kuma.io/docs (see the documentation contribution section)
• Providing your feedback on the proposed features and designs
• Reviewing Pull Requests
• Writing a blog post on how you're using Kuma

If you wish to contribute code (features or bug fixes), see the Submitting a patch section.

Improving the documentation

The documentation hosted at https://kuma.io/docs is open source and built with Netlify. You are welcome to propose changes to it (correct typos, add examples or clarifications...)!

The repository is also hosted on GitHub at: kumahq/kuma-website

Improving the GUI

The GUI code is in the kumahq/kuma-gui repository.

Submitting a patch

Feel free to contribute fixes or minor features, we love to receive Pull Requests! If you are planning to develop a larger feature, come talk to us first on Slack!

When contributing, please follow the guidelines provided in this document. They will cover topics such as the different Git branches we use, the commit message format to use or the appropriate code style.

Once you have read them, and you are ready to submit your Pull Request, be sure to verify a few things:

• Your work was based on the appropriate branch (master vs. feature/latest), and you are opening your Pull Request against the appropriate one
• Your commit history is clean: changes are atomic and the git message format was respected
• Rebase your work on top of the base branch (seek help online on how to use git rebase; this is important to ensure your commit history is clean and linear)
• The code formatting and the files are generated is good: make check will help.
• The tests are passing: make test, make test/kuma-cp, make test/kuma-dp, or whichever make target under test/ is appropriate for your change
• If your PR are open and some tests are failing due to outdated golden files or formatted and generated files are incorrect a maintainer can fix it by adding a comment /format or /golden_files.
• If you are introducing a change that might break on ipv6 or old k8s kubernetes (v1.19.16-k3s1) consider creating PR with a label ci/run-full-matrix that will trigger the full test matrix
• If your PR doesn't need to run e2e tests or tests at all use: ci/skip-test or ci/skip-e2e-test labels on the PR.
• If you are introducing a change which requires specific attention when upgrading update UPGRADE.md
• Do not update CHANGELOG.md yourself. Your change will be included there when we release, no worries! You can however help us maintain a good changelog and release notes by following this process:
  • By default, the changelog generation will use the PR title. If you want to specify something different as a Changelog entry add a line that starts with > Changelog: in the PR description e.g.:> Changelog: feat: my new feature. Reusing the same content across multiple PRs will rollup all the PRs in a single changelog entry (this is useful for features that span multiple PRs).
  • By default, all commit messages that start with build, ci, test, refactor will be excluded from the Changelog. If you still want a change to be included add a > Changelog: entry in the PR description.
  • If you want a change to not be included in the changelog you can add > Changelog: skip to explicitly ignore it. This is in the PR description because it enables you to add/modify it even after merging a PR. curious about the automation? You can find it in: tools/releases/changelog.

If the above guidelines are respected, your Pull Request will be reviewed by a maintainer.

If you are asked to update your patch by a reviewer, please do so! Remember: you are responsible for pushing your patch forward. If you contributed it, you are probably the one in need of it. You must be prepared to apply changes to it if necessary.

If your Pull Request was accepted and fixes a bug, adds functionality, or makes it significantly easier to use or understand Kuma, congratulations! You are now an official contributor to Kuma. Get in touch with us to receive your very own Contributor T-shirt!

Your change will be included in the subsequent release Changelog, and we will not forget to include your name if you are an external contributor. 😉

Writing tests

We use Ginkgo to write our tests. Your patch should include the related test updates or additions, in the appropriate test suite. Checkout DEVELOPER.md for some extra info related to tests.

Sign Your Work

The sign-off is a simple line at the end of the explanation for a commit. All commits needs to be signed. Your signature certifies that you wrote the patch or otherwise have the right to contribute the material. The rules are pretty simple, if you can certify the below (from developercertificate.org):

To signify that you agree to the DCO for a commit, you add a line to the git commit message:

Signed-off-by: Jane Smith <[email protected]>

In most cases, you can add this signoff to your commit automatically with the -s flag to git commit. You must use your real name and a reachable email address (sorry, no pseudonyms or anonymous contributions).

Commit atomicity

When submitting patches, it is important that you organize your commits in logical units of work. You are free to propose a patch with one or many commits, as long as their atomicity is respected. This means that no unrelated changes should be included in a commit.

For example: you are writing a patch to fix a bug, but in your endeavour, you spot another bug. Do not fix both bugs in the same commit! Finish your work on the initial bug, propose your patch, and come back to the second bug later on. This is also valid for unrelated style fixes, refactors, etc...

You should use your best judgment when facing such decisions. A good approach for this is to put yourself in the shoes of the person who will review your patch: will they understand your changes and reasoning just by reading your commit history? Will they find unrelated changes in a particular commit? They shouldn't!

Writing meaningful commit messages that follow our commit message format will also help you respect this mantra (see the below section).

Commit message format

We follow Conventional Commits for commit messages and PR titles.

A quick overview on commit messages:

• The tense of your message must be present
• Your message must be prefixed by a type, and a scope
• The header of your message should not be longer than 50 characters
• A blank line should be included between the header and the body
• The body of your message should not contain lines longer than 72 characters

Here is a template of what your commit message should look like:

<type>(<scope>): <subject>
<BLANK LINE>
<body>
<BLANK LINE>
<footer>

The exact details of the format can be found in the conventional commits specification.

Type

Allowed types are enforced via commitlint. The list can be found at the config-conventional repository. fix and feat should only be used for end user visibile contributions. A change to CI, build, a MADR or docs contribution should use the respective ci, build, test types.

Scope

The scope is the part of the codebase that is affected by your change. Choosing it is at your discretion, but here are some of the most frequent ones:

• kuma-cp: A change that affects the control-plane
• kuma-dp: A change that affects the data-plane
• kumactl: A change to the kumactl
• deps: When updating dependencies (to be used with the chore prefix)
• api-server: When changing to admin api
• xds: When changing something related to xds
• kds: When change something related to kds
• MeshRetry: When changing a specific policy
• policy: When changing something that affects all policies
• conf: Configuration-related changes (new values, improvements...)

The usual casing for scope is to use singular kebab-case except if it's a public api in which case use whatever the public name is (which usually is PascalCase). This is why you can have feat(api-server) but fix(MeshRetry).

Missing or * scope is not allowed. There's usually always something you can put

Subject

Your subject should contain a succinct description of the change. It should be written so that:

• It uses the present, imperative tense: "fix typo", and not "fixed" or "fixes"
• It is not capitalized: "fix typo", and not "Fix typo"
• It does not include a period. 😄

Body

The body of your commit message should contain a detailed description of your changes. Ideally, if the change is significant, you should explain its motivation, the chosen implementation, and justify it.

As previously mentioned, lines in the commit messages should not exceed 72 characters.

Footer

The footer is the ideal place to link to related material about the change: related GitHub issues, Pull Requests, fixed bug reports, etc...

Examples

Here are a few examples of good commit messages to take inspiration from:

fix(admin): send HTTP 405 on unsupported method

The appropriate status code when the request method is not supported
on an endpoint it 405. We previously used to send HTTP 404, which
is not appropriate. This updates the Admin API helpers to properly
return 405 on such user errors.

* return 405 when the method is not supported in the Admin API helpers
* add a new test case in the Admin API test suite

Fix #678

Backporting

We have a strict policy on backporting changes to stable branches. We apply this policy to simplify upgrades between patch versions by keeping the delta between patch versions as small as possible.

Changes that are to be backported should only be critical bug fixes of one of these types:

• Loss of data
• Memory corruption
• Panic, crash, hang
• Security
• CI/CD (anything related to the release process)

If you think your PR applies and should be backported please add the label: backport. Once the PR is approved and merged the action backport.yaml will open a new PR with the backport for each of the maintained branches. If you backport a change it's your responsibility to make sure the backports goes through.

Reviewing

You can indicate that you are reviewing a PR by using the eyes emoji on the PR description. If you give up on doing so please remove the emoji.

Contributor Badge

If your Pull Request to kumahq/kuma was accepted, and it fixes a bug, adds functionality, or makes it significantly easier to use or understand Kuma, congratulations! You are eligible to receive a digital Contributor Badge! Go ahead and fill out the Contributor Submissions form.

Badges expire after 1 year, at which point you may submit a new contribution to renew the badge.