open-consul/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Consul

Note: We take Consul's security and our users' trust very seriously. If you believe you have found a security issue in Consul, please responsibly disclose by contacting us at security@hashicorp.com.

First: if you're unsure or afraid of anything, just ask or submit the issue or pull request anyways. You won't be yelled at for giving your best effort. The worst that can happen is that you'll be politely asked to change something. We appreciate any sort of contributions, and don't want a wall of rules to get in the way of that.

That said, if you want to ensure that a pull request is likely to be merged, talk to us! A great way to do this is in issues themselves. When you want to work on an issue, comment on it first and tell us the approach you want to take.

Getting Started

Some Ways to Contribute

• Report potential bugs.
• Suggest product enhancements.
• Increase our test coverage.
• Fix a bug.
• Implement a requested enhancement.
• Improve our guides and documentation. Consul's Guides, Docs, and api godoc are deployed from this repo.
• Respond to questions about usage on the issue tracker or the Consul section of the [HashiCorp forum]: (https://discuss.hashicorp.com/c/consul)

Reporting an Issue:

Note: Issues on GitHub for Consul are intended to be related to bugs or feature requests. Questions should be directed to other community resources such as the: Discuss Forum, FAQ, or Guides.

• Make sure you test against the latest released version. It is possible we already fixed the bug you're experiencing. However, if you are on an older version of Consul and feel the issue is critical, do let us know.

• Check existing issues (both open and closed) to make sure it has not been reported previously.

• Provide a reproducible test case. If a contributor can't reproduce an issue, then it dramatically lowers the chances it'll get fixed.

• Aim to respond promptly to any questions made by the Consul team on your issue. Stale issues will be closed.

Issue Lifecycle

1. The issue is reported.

2. The issue is verified and categorized by a Consul maintainer. Categorization is done via tags. For example, bugs are tagged as "bug".

3. Unless it is critical, the issue is left for a period of time (sometimes many weeks), giving outside contributors a chance to address the issue.

4. The issue is addressed in a pull request or commit. The issue will be referenced in the commit message so that the code that fixes it is clearly linked.

5. The issue is closed.

Building Consul

If you wish to work on Consul itself, you'll first need Go installed (The version of Go should match the one of our CI config's Go image).

Next, clone this repository and then run make dev. In a few moments, you'll have a working consul executable in consul/bin and $GOPATH/bin:

Note: make dev will build for your local machine's os/architecture. If you wish to build for all os/architecture combinations use make.

Making Changes to Consul

The first step to making changes is to fork Consul. Afterwards, the easiest way to work on the fork is to set it as a remote of the Consul project:

1. Navigate to $GOPATH/src/github.com/hashicorp/consul
2. Rename the existing remote's name: git remote rename origin upstream.
3. Add your fork as a remote by running git remote add origin <github url of fork>. For example: git remote add origin https://github.com/myusername/consul.
4. Checkout a feature branch: git checkout -t -b new-feature
5. Make changes
6. Push changes to the fork when ready to submit PR: git push -u origin new-feature

By following these steps you can push to your fork to create a PR, but the code on disk still lives in the spot where the go cli tools are expecting to find it.

Note: If you make any changes to the code, run gofmt -s -w to automatically format the code according to Go standards.

Testing

During development, it may be more convenient to check your work-in-progress by running only the tests which you expect to be affected by your changes, as the full test suite can take several minutes to execute. Go's built-in test tool allows specifying a list of packages to test and the -run option to only include test names matching a regular expression. The go test -short flag can also be used to skip slower tests.

Examples (run from the repository root):

• go test -v ./connect will run all tests in the connect package (see ./connect folder)
• go test -v -run TestRetryJoin ./command/agent will run all tests in the agent package (see ./command/agent folder) with name substring TestRetryJoin

When a pull request is opened CI will run all tests and lint to verify the change.

Go Module Dependencies

If a dependency is added or change, run go mod tidy to update go.mod and go.sum.

Developer Documentation

Documentation about the Consul code base is under ./docs, and godoc package document can be read at pkg.go.dev/github.com/hashicorp/consul.

Checklists

Some common changes that many PRs require such as adding config fields, are documented through checklists.

Please check in docs/ for any checklist-*.md files that might help with your change.