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.
Consult the Table of Contents below, and jump to the desired section.
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!
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:
- A summary of the issue
- A list of steps to reproduce the issue
- The version of Kuma you encountered the issue with
- 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.
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.
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.
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: https://github.com/kumahq/kuma-website
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 (
mastervs.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 tests are passing: run
make test,make test/kuma-cp,make test/kuma-dp, or whichever make target undertest/is appropriate for your change - Do not update CHANGELOG.md yourself. Your change will be included there in due time if it is accepted, no worries!
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. 😉
As a best practice to keep your development environment as organized as possible, create local branches to work within. These should also be created directly off of the master branch. If you have write access to the GitHub repository, please follow the following naming scheme when pushing your branch(es):
feat/foo-barfor new featuresfix/foo-barfor bug fixestests/foo-barwhen the change concerns only the test suiterefactor/foo-barwhen refactoring code without any behavior changestyle/foo-barwhen addressing some style issuedocs/foo-barfor updates to the README.md, this file, or similar documents
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 <jane.smith@example.com>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).
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).
To maintain a healthy Git history, we ask of you that you write your commit messages as follows:
- 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 type of your commit indicates what type of change this commit is about. The accepted types are:
- feat: A new feature
- fix: A bug fix
- hotfix: An urgent bug fix during a release process
- tests: A change that is purely related to the test suite only (fixing a test, adding a test, improving its reliability, etc...)
- docs: Changes to the README.md, this file, or other such documents
- style: Changes that do not affect the meaning of the code (white-space trimming, formatting, etc...)
- perf: A code change that significantly improves performance
- refactor: A code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature, and
is too big to be considered just
perf - chore: Maintenance changes related to code cleaning that isn't considered part of a refactor, build process updates, or dependency bumps
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
choreprefix) - conf: Configuration-related changes (new values, improvements...)
*: When the change affects too many parts of the codebase at once (this should be rare and avoided)
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. 😄
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.
The footer is the ideal place to link to related material about the change: related GitHub issues, Pull Requests, fixed bug reports, etc...
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
We use Ginkgo to write our tests. Your patch should include the related test updates or additions, in the appropriate test suite.
If your Pull Request to Kong/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 the very special Contributor T-shirt! Go ahead and fill out the Contributors Submissions form.