👍🎉 First and foremost, thanks for taking the time to contribute! 🎉👍
The following is a set of guidelines for contributing to LNP/BP Standards Association projects, which are hosted in the GitHub organizations listed in readme. These are mostly guidelines, not rules. Use your best judgment, and feel free to propose changes to this document in a pull request.
- General
- Communication channels
- Asking questions
- Contribution workflow
- Coding conventions
- Security
- Testing
- Going further
The LNP/BP projects operate an open contributor model where anyone is welcome to contribute towards development in the form of peer review, documentation, testing and patches.
Anyone is invited to contribute without regard to technical experience, "expertise", OSS experience, age, or other concern. However, the development of standards & reference implementations demands a high-level of rigor, adversarial thinking, thorough testing and risk-minimization. Any bug may cost users real money. That being said, we deeply welcome people contributing for the first time to an open source project or pick up Rust while contributing. Don't be shy, you'll learn.
Communication about LNP/BP standards & implementations happens primarily on #lnp-pb IRC chat on Freenode with the logs available at http://gnusha.org/lnp-bp/
Discussion about code base improvements happens in GitHub issues and on pull requests.
Major projects are tracked here. Project roadmap is tracked in each repository GitHub milestones.
Note: Please don't file an issue to ask a question. Each repository - or GitHub organization has a "Discussions" with Q&A section; please post your questions there. You'll get faster results by using this channel.
Alternatively, we have a dedicated developer channel on IRC, #[email protected] where you may get helpful advice if you have questions.
The codebase is maintained using the "contributor workflow" where everyone without exception contributes patch proposals using "pull requests". This facilitates social contribution, easy testing and peer review.
To contribute a patch, the workflow is a as follows:
- Fork Repository
- Create topic branch
- Commit patches
In general commits should be atomic and diffs should be easy to read. For this reason do not mix any formatting fixes or code moves with actual code changes. Further, each commit, individually, should compile and pass tests, in order to ensure git bisect and other automated tools function properly.
When adding a new feature thought must be given to the long term technical debt. Every new features should be covered by unit tests.
When refactoring, structure your PR to make it easy to review and don't hesitate to split it into multiple small, focused PRs.
The Minimal Supported Rust Version is nightly for the period of active development; it is enforced by our Travis. Later we plan to fix to some specific Rust version after the initial library release.
Commits should cover both the issue fixed and the solution's rationale. These guidelines should be kept in mind.
To facilitate communication with other contributors, the project is making use of GitHub's "assignee" field. First check that no one is assigned and then comment suggesting that you're working on it. If someone is already assigned, don't hesitate to ask if the assigned party or previous commenters are still working on it if it has been awhile.
The main library development happens in the master branch. This branch must
always compile without errors (using Travis CI). All external contributions are
made within PRs into this branch.
Prerequisites that a PR must satisfy for merging into the master branch:
- the tip of any PR branch must compile and pass unit tests with no errors, with every feature combination (including compiling the fuzztests) on MSRV, stable and nightly compilers (this is partially automated with CI, so the rule is that we will not accept commits which do not pass GitHub CI);
- contain all necessary tests for the introduced functional (either as a part of commits, or, more preferably, as separate commits, so that it's easy to reorder them during review and check that the new tests fail without the new code);
- contain all inline docs for newly introduced API and pass doc tests;
- be based on the recent
mastertip from the original repository at.
NB: reviewers may run more complex test/CI scripts, thus, satisfying all the
requirements above is just a preliminary, but not necessary sufficient step for
getting the PR accepted as a valid candidate PR for the master branch.
Additionally, to the master branch some repositories may have develop branch
for any experimental developments. This branch may not compile and should not be
used by any projects depending on the library.
Anyone may participate in peer review which is expressed by comments in the pull request. Typically reviewers will review the code for obvious errors, as well as test out the patch set and opine on the technical merits of the patch. PR should be reviewed first on the conceptual level before focusing on code style or grammar fixes.
Our CI enforces clippy's default linting and rustfmt formatting defined by rules in .rustfmt.toml. The linter should be run with current stable rust compiler, while formatter requires nightly version due to the use of unstable formatting parameters.
If you use rustup, to lint locally you may run the following instructions:
rustup component add clippy
rustup component add fmt
cargo +stable clippy --workspace --all-features
cargo +nightly fmt --allSecurity is the primary focus of LNP/BP libraries; disclosure of security vulnerabilities helps prevent user loss of funds. If you believe a vulnerability may affect other implementations, please inform them. Guidelines for a responsible disclosure can be found in SECURITY.md file in the project root.
Note that some of LNP/BP projects are currently considered "pre-production".
Such projects can be distinguished by the absence of SECURITY.md. In such
cases there are no special handling of security issues; please simply open
an issue on GitHub.
Related to the security aspect, LNP/BP developers take testing very seriously. Due to the modular nature of the project, writing new functional tests is easy and good test coverage of the codebase is an important goal.
Fuzzing is heavily encouraged: feel free to add related material under fuzz/
Mutation testing is planned; any contribution there would be warmly welcomed.
You may be interested in Jon Atack guide on How to review Bitcoin Core PRs and How to make Bitcoin Core PRs. While there are differences between the projects in terms of context and maturity, many of the suggestions offered apply to this project.
Overall, have fun :)