Contributors' Guide

Contributing to concord-bft

The concord-bft project team welcomes contributions from the community. If you wish to contribute code and you have not signed our contributor license agreement (CLA), our bot will update the issue when you open a Pull Request. For any questions about the CLA process, please refer to our FAQ.

Contribution Flow

This is a rough outline of what a contributor's workflow looks like:

• Fork the repository
• Create a topic branch on your fork^* from where you want to base your work
• Make commits of logical units
• Make sure your commit messages are in the proper format (see below)
• Push your changes to a topic branch in your fork of the repository
• Submit a pull request

^* Make sure that you create a branch on your fork and not the main repository. If you push your changes together with your PR from a branch you created on the main repository, it would trigger the CI twice (on push and on PR), resulting in unecessary load on Github Actions.

Example:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/vmware/concord-bft.git
git checkout -b my-new-feature master
git commit -a
git push origin my-new-feature

Staying In Sync With Upstream

When your branch gets out of sync with the vmware/master branch, use the following to update:

git checkout my-new-feature
git fetch -a
git pull --rebase upstream master
git push --force-with-lease origin my-new-feature

Updating pull requests

If your PR fails to pass CI or needs changes based on code review, you'll most likely want to squash these changes into existing commits.

If your pull request contains a single commit or your changes are related to the most recent commit, you can simply amend the commit.

git add .
git commit --amend
git push --force-with-lease origin my-new-feature

If you need to squash changes into an earlier commit, you can use:

git add .
git commit --fixup <commit>
git rebase -i --autosquash master
git push --force-with-lease origin my-new-feature

Be sure to add a comment to the PR indicating your new changes are ready to review, as GitHub does not generate a notification when you git push.

Formatting Commit Messages

We follow the conventions on How to Write a Git Commit Message.

Be sure to include any related GitHub issue references in the commit message. See GFM syntax for referencing issues and commits.

Formatting Code

We mostly follow the guidelines outlined by the Google C++ Style Guide. If you use emacs, consider installing google-c-style.el.

Our code style has the following exceptions that differ from the google C++ style guidelines.

• We use camelCase function and method names, rather than PascalCase.
• We allow, and encourage the use of exceptions.
• We allow and prefer #pragma once over include guards

Reporting Bugs and Creating Issues

When opening a new issue, try to roughly follow the commit message format conventions above.