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How to contribute
We welcome your patches and contributions to gRPC! Please read the gRPC organization's governance rules before proceeding.
If you are new to GitHub, please start by reading Pull Request howto
Legal requirements
In order to protect both you and ourselves, you will need to sign the Contributor License Agreement. When you create your first PR, a link will be added as a comment that contains the steps needed to complete this process.
Getting Started
A great way to start is by searching through our open issues. Unassigned issues labeled as "help wanted" are especially nice for first-time contributors, as they should be well-defined problems that already have agreed-upon solutions.
Code Style
We follow Google's published Go style guide. Note that there are three primary documents that make up this style guide; please follow them as closely as possible. If a reviewer recommends something that contradicts those guidelines, there may be valid reasons to do so, but it should be rare.
Guidelines for Pull Requests
How to get your contributions merged smoothly and quickly:
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Create small PRs that are narrowly focused on addressing a single concern. We often receive PRs that attempt to fix several things at the same time, and if one part of the PR has a problem, that will hold up the entire PR.
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For speculative changes, consider opening an issue and discussing it first. If you are suggesting a behavioral or API change, consider starting with a gRFC proposal. Many new features that are not bug fixes will require cross-language agreement.
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If you want to fix formatting or style, consider whether your changes are an obvious improvement or might be considered a personal preference. If a style change is based on preference, it likely will not be accepted. If it corrects widely agreed-upon anti-patterns, then please do create a PR and explain the benefits of the change.
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For correcting misspellings, please be aware that we use some terms that are sometimes flagged by spell checkers. As an example, "if an only if" is often written as "iff". Please do not make spelling correction changes unless you are certain they are misspellings.
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Provide a good PR description as a record of what change is being made and why it was made. Link to a GitHub issue if it exists.
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Maintain a clean commit history and use meaningful commit messages. PRs with messy commit histories are difficult to review and won't be merged. Before sending your PR, ensure your changes are based on top of the latest
upstream/master
commits, and avoid rebasing in the middle of a code review. You should never usegit push -f
unless absolutely necessary during a review, as it can interfere with GitHub's tracking of comments. -
All tests need to be passing before your change can be merged. We recommend you run tests locally before creating your PR to catch breakages early on:
./scripts/vet.sh
to catch vet errors.go test -cpu 1,4 -timeout 7m ./...
to run the tests.go test -race -cpu 1,4 -timeout 7m ./...
to run tests in race mode.
Note that we have a multi-module repo, so
go test
commands may need to be run from the root of each module in order to cause all tests to run.Alternatively, you may find it easier to push your changes to your fork on GitHub, which will trigger a GitHub Actions run that you can use to verify everything is passing.
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If you are adding a new file, make sure it has the copyright message template at the top as a comment. You can copy the message from an existing file and update the year.
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The grpc package should only depend on standard Go packages and a small number of exceptions. If your contribution introduces new dependencies, you will need a discussion with gRPC-Go maintainers. A GitHub action check will run on every PR, and will flag any transitive dependency changes from any public package.
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Unless your PR is trivial, you should expect reviewer comments that you will need to address before merging. We'll label the PR as
Status: Requires Reporter Clarification
if we expect you to respond to these comments in a timely manner. If the PR remains inactive for 6 days, it will be marked asstale
, and we will automatically close it after 7 days if we don't hear back from you. Please feel free to ping issues or bugs if you do not get a response within a week. -
Exceptions to the rules can be made if there's a compelling reason to do so.