- General Procedure
- Architecture Decision Records (ADR)
- Forking
- Dependencies
- Protobuf
- Development Procedure
- Testing
- Updating Documentation
- Branching Model and Release
Thank you for considering making contributions to Ethermint and related repositories!
Ethermint uses Tendermint’s coding repo for overall information on repository workflow and standards.
Contributing to this repo can mean many things such as participating in discussion or proposing code changes. To ensure a smooth workflow for all contributors, the following general procedure for contributing has been established:
- Either open or find an issue you have identified and would like to contribute to resolving.
- Participate in thoughtful discussion on that issue.
- If you would like to contribute:
- If the issue is a proposal, ensure that the proposal has been accepted by ChainSafe’s Ethermint team.
- Ensure that nobody else has already begun working on the same issue. If someone already has, please make sure to contact the individual to collaborate.
- If nobody has been assigned the issue and you would like to work on it, make a comment on the issue to inform the community of your intentions to begin work. Ideally, wait for confirmation that no one has started it. However, if you are eager and do not get a prompt response, feel free to dive on in!
- Follow standard Github best practices:
- Fork the repo
- Branch from the HEAD of
development
(For core developers working within the cosmos-sdk repo, to ensure a clear ownership of branches, branches must be named with the convention{moniker}/{issue#}-branch-name
). - Make commits
- Submit a PR to
development
- Be sure to submit the PR in
Draft
mode. Submit your PR early, even if it's incomplete as this indicates to the community you're working on something and allows them to provide comments early in the development process. - When the code is complete it can be marked
Ready for Review
. - Be sure to include a relevant change log entry in the
Unreleased
section ofCHANGELOG.md
(see file for log format). - Please make sure to run
make format
before every commit - the easiest way to do this is having your editor run it for you upon saving a file. Additionally, please ensure that your code is lint compliant by runningmake lint
. There are CI tests built into the Ethermint repository and all PR’s will require that these tests pass before they are able to be merged.
Note: for very small or blatantly obvious problems (such as typos), it is not required to open an issue to submit a PR, but be aware that for more complex problems/features, if a PR is opened before an adequate design discussion has taken place in a github issue, that PR runs a high likelihood of being rejected.
Looking for a good place to start contributing? How about checking out some good first issues.
When proposing an architecture decision for Ethermint, please create an ADR so further discussions can be made. We are following this process so all involved parties are in agreement before any party begins coding the proposed implementation. If you would like to see some examples of how these are written refer to Tendermint ADRs.
Please note that Go requires code to live under absolute paths, which complicates forking. While my fork lives
at https://github.com/chainsafe/cosmos-sdk
, the code should never exist
at $GOPATH/src/github.com/chainsafe/cosmos-sdk
. Instead, we use git remote
to add the fork as a new remote for the
original repo,$GOPATH/src/github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk
, and do all the work there.
For instance, to create a fork and work on a branch of it, you would:
- Create the fork on github, using the fork button.
- Go to the original repo checked out locally. (i.e.
$GOPATH/src/github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk
) git remote rename origin upstream
git remote add origin [email protected]:chainsafe/cosmos-sdk.git
Now origin
refers to my fork and upstream
refers to the Cosmos-SDK version. So I can git push -u origin master
to
update my fork, and make pull requests to Cosmos-SDK from there. Of course, replace chainsafe
with your git handle.
To pull in updates from the origin repo, run:
git fetch upstream
git rebase upstream/master
(or whatever branch you want)
Please NO DOT make Pull Requests from development
.
We use Go 1.15 Modules to manage dependency versions.
The master branch of every Cosmos repository should just build with go get
, which means they should be kept up-to-date
with their dependencies, so we can get away with telling people they can just go get
our software.
Since some dependencies are not under our control, a third party may break our build, in which case we can fall back
on go mod tidy -v
.
We use Protocol Buffers along with gogoproto to generate code for use in Ethermint.
For deterministic behavior around Protobuf tooling, everything is containerized using Docker. Make sure to have Docker installed on your machine, or head to Docker's website to install it.
For formatting code in .proto
files, you can run make proto-format
command.
For linting and checking breaking changes, we use buf. You can use the commands make proto-lint
and make proto-check-breaking
to respectively lint your proto files and check for breaking changes.
To generate the protobuf stubs, you can run make proto-gen
.
We also added the make proto-all
command to run all the above commands sequentially.
In order for imports to properly compile in your IDE, you may need to manually set your protobuf path in your IDE's
workspace settings/config
.
For example, in vscode your .vscode/settings.json
should look like:
{
"protoc": {
"options": [
"--proto_path=${workspaceRoot}/proto",
"--proto_path=${workspaceRoot}/third_party/proto"
]
}
}
- The latest state of development is on
development
. development
must never failmake lint, make test, make test-race, make test-rpc, make test-solidity, make test-import
- No
--force
ontodevelopment
(except when reverting a broken commit, which should seldom happen). - Create your feature branch from
development
either ongithub.com/cosmos/ethermint
, or your fork ( usinggit remote add origin
). - Before submitting a pull request, begin
git rebase
on top ofdevelopment
.
Ethermint uses GitHub Actions for automated testing.
If you open a PR on the Ethermint repo, it is mandatory to update the relevant documentation in /docs
. Please refer to
the docs subdirectory and make changes accordingly. Prior to approval, the Code owners/approvers may request some
updates to specific docs.
User-facing repos should adhere to the trunk based development branching model.
Libraries need not follow the model strictly, but would be wise to.
Ethermint utilizes semantic versioning.
Ensure that you base and target your PR on the development
branch.
All feature additions should be targeted against development
. Bug fixes for an outstanding release candidate should be
targeted against the release candidate branch.
To accommodate the review process, we suggest that PRs are categorically broken up. Ideally each PR addresses only a single issue. Additionally, as much as possible code refactoring and cleanup should be submitted as separate PRs from bug fixes/feature-additions.
All PRs require two Reviews before merge. When reviewing PRs, please use the following review explanations:
LGTM
without an explicit approval means that the changes look good, but you haven't pulled down the code, run tests locally and thoroughly reviewed it.Approval
through the GH UI means that you understand the code, documentation/spec is updated in the right places, you have pulled down and tested the code locally. In addition:- You must think through whether any added code could be partially combined (DRYed) with existing code.
- You must think through any potential security issues or incentive-compatibility flaws introduced by the changes.
- Naming convention must be consistent with the rest of the codebase.
- Code must live in a reasonable location, considering dependency structures (e.g. not importing testing modules in production code, or including example code modules in production code).
- If you approve of the PR, you are responsible for fixing any of the issues mentioned here.
- If you are only making "surface level" reviews, submit any notes as
Comments
without adding a review.
- Ensure pull branch is rebased on
development
. - Run
make test
to ensure that all tests pass. - Squash merge pull request.
- Start on
development
. - Create the release candidate branch
rc/v*
(going forward known asRC
) and ensure it's protected against pushing from anyone except the release manager/coordinator. No PRs targeting this branch should be merged unless exceptional circumstances arise. - On the
RC
branch, prepare a new version section in theCHANGELOG.md
. All links must be link-ified:
$ python ./scripts/linkify_changelog.py CHANGELOG.md
Copy the entries into aRELEASE_CHANGELOG.md
. This is needed so the bot knows which entries to add to the release page on github. - Kick off a large round of simulation testing (e.g. 400 seeds for 2k blocks).
- If errors are found during the simulation testing, commit the fixes to
development
and create a newRC
branch ( making sure to increment thercN
). - After simulation has successfully completed, create the release branch (
release/vX.XX.X
) from theRC
branch. - Create a PR to
development
to incorporate theCHANGELOG.md
updates. - Tag the release (use
git tag -a
) and create a release in Github. - Delete the
RC
branches.
Note: ChainSafe’s Ethermint team currently cuts releases on a need to have basis. We will announce a more standardized release schedule as we near production readiness.