Contributing Workflow

Setup

  1. Fork the project repository by clicking on the "Fork" button on the project's GitHub page. This will create a copy of the repository under your GitHub account.
  2. Clone your forked repository to your local machine using the git clone command. This will create a local copy of the repository that you can work on.
  3. Install the project dependencies by installing libopenssl-dev and libdbus-sys are installed on your system. Both are required by Nazara to compile.

Note

The names of both of these libraries can vary depending on your distribution. The examples are for openSUSE Tumbleweed.

  1. Install and set up pre-commit for code quality checks. This tool will automatically execute the hooks we implemented which will check your code for formatting or styling issue before each commit.

Note

Note: If pre-commit fails on execution, be sure to run cargo format and cargo clippy on your code and fix any issues raised by these tools.

Changing Documentation

In case you want - or need - to do changes to this documentation, you need to install both mdbook and mdbook-admonish via cargo.

Simply run these commands:

cargo install mdbook mdbook-admonish

To build the documentation run these commands from the repo's root:

mdbook build docs && mdbook serve docs

This will create a local deployment of the documentation at localhost:3000 with automatic rebuilds upon change.

Making changes

Once you have set up the project your can start working on your contribution.

1. Create a new branch for your changes

Note that working branches should have one of these prefixes.

  • feature/: For adding new features to Nazara
  • docs/: For changing documentation
  • ci/: For CI/CD maintenance
  • fix/: For bugfixes
  • dep/: For deprecations
  • tests/: For branches that add/change tests

Example

Examples of good or bad branch names would look like this:

feature/add-vm-creation, rather than add-vm

2. Make meaningful committs

It is important to pay attention to the scope of your contribution. To this end please only make changes in one Pull Request which are related to your specific contribution.

This makes it easier for us to review your PR and to keep the commit history clean. (If you encounter something else you want to change, which is not directly linked to your contribution, please open a PR on a separate branch for this change.)

Hint

Please refer to our Code Style Guide to find out how our code should be formatted and documented.

3. Include tests in your code

Automated tests are essential to ensure the correctness and reliability of the codebase. Therefore it is required that Pull Requests, which change the existing behaviour of the codebase (e.g by adding features), must be covered with tests by the contributor whenever possible in the same PR as the contribution itself. Code without tests might be rejected or take longer to process.

4. Push your branch to your fork.

5. Open a PR against the main repository.

Fill out the PR form and provide a detailed description of what your PR does and the reason or motivation behind the change.

Hint

To make it easier for us to process your contribution, please stick to the PR template.

6. Wait for CI to pass.

Our CI workflows run on pushes and PRs and will check for code quality, format and vulnerabilities. They might also execute all tests they find. It is imperative that all checks are green before a contribution is green. Please check and fix any errors the workflows find.

7. Wait for review.

That's it, now you can, if not already automatically done so, request a review by one of the repository maintainers. We will come back to you as quickly as we can.

Pay Attention To

  1. To ensure that all code is properly formatted, please run cargo format on you code before submitting it. pre-commit will tell you when your code is not properly formatted.
  2. Documentation is key. We require, that all code contributions are properly documented not only with commit messages and meaningful PR descriptions, but also that the code itself is properly documented with docstrings. This ensures that new contributors and maintainers alike can navigate their way through the codebase. This has the added benefit that your PR can be accepted much quicker too.

Important

For any other questions regarding style, please refer to the Code Style Guide.

Introducing a Dependency

While we would prefer contributors not to introduce new dependencies, we acknowledge that this is not always possible.

Therefore, please refer to our Dependency Policy to see which dependencies we accept, and also please be ready to explain why introducing this dependency was necessary.

A word on vulnerabilities

If you discover a security vulnerability in our code, please inform us privately immediately according to our Security Policy.

If you wish to fix a vulnerability, please also inform us and stand by for our green light. We would still like to investigate the vulnerability for ourselves to get an overview over the severity and scope of the problem. Please refrain from publishing a fix until we came back to you or have published a security advisory.

License Disclaimer

By submitting a contribution to The Nazara Project, you agree that your contribution shall be licensed under the same license(s) as the project at the time of contribution.

You also grant the project maintainers the right to relicense the project, including your contribution, under any future version of those license(s), or under any other license that is free and open source software (FOSS) and compatible with the current license(s).