community/contributors/guide

OWNER:

sig-contributor-experience

Disclaimer

Hello! This is the starting point for our brand new contributor guide, currently underway as per issue#6102 and in need of help. Please be patient, or fix a section below that needs improvement, and submit a pull request!

Many of the links below should lead to relevant documents scattered across the community repository. Often, the linked instructions need to be updated or cleaned up.

• If you do so, please move the relevant file from its previous location to the community/contributors/guide folder, and delete its previous location.
• Our goal is that all contributor guide specific files live in this folder.

Please find Improvements needed sections below and help us out.

For example:

Improvements needed

• kubernetes/kubernetes/contributing.md -> point to this guide

• kubernetes/community/CONTRIBUTING.md -> Needs a rewrite

• kubernetes/community/README.md -> Needs a rewrite

• Individual SIG contributing documents -> add a link to this guide

• Generate ToC for the section below

Welcome

Welcome to Kubernetes! This document is the single source of truth for how to contribute to the code base. Please leave comments / suggestions if you find something is missing or incorrect.

Before you get started

Sign the CLA

Before you can contribute, you will need to sign the Contributor License Agreement.

Setting up your development environment

If you haven’t set up your environment, please find resources here. These resources are not well organized currently; please have patience as we are working on it.

Improvements needed

• A new developer guide will be created and linked to in this section.

  • RyanJ from Red Hat is working on this

Community Expectations

Kubernetes is a community project. Consequently, it is wholly dependent on its community to provide a productive, friendly and collaborative environment.

The first and foremost goal of the Kubernetes community to develop orchestration technology that radically simplifies the process of creating reliable distributed systems. However a second, equally important goal is the creation of a community that fosters easy, agile development of such orchestration systems.

We therefore describe the expectations for members of the Kubernetes community. This document is intended to be a living one that evolves as the community evolves via the same pull request and code review process that shapes the rest of the project. It currently covers the expectations of conduct that govern all members of the community as well as the expectations around code review that govern all active contributors to Kubernetes.

Code of Conduct

Please make sure to read and observe our Code of Conduct

Thanks

Many thanks in advance to everyone who contributes their time and effort to making Kubernetes both a successful system as well as a successful community. The strength of our software shines in the strengths of each individual community member. Thanks!

Your First Contribution

(from here)

Have you ever wanted to contribute to the coolest cloud technology? We will help you understand the organization of the Kubernetes project and direct you to the best places to get started. You'll be able to pick up issues, write code to fix them, and get your work reviewed and merged.

If you have questions about the development process, feel free to jump into our Slack Channel or join our mailing list.

Improvements needed

• The doc linked above is being reinvented in this README. All relevant information should be ported to a logical place in this document/folder, and the original document deleted.

Find something to work on

Help is always welcome! For example, documentation (like the text you are reading now) can always use improvement. There's always code that can be clarified and variables or functions that can be renamed or commented. There's always a need for more test coverage. You get the idea - if you ever see something you think should be fixed, you should own it. Here is how you get started.

Find a good first topic

Each repository in the Kubernetes organization has beginner-friendly issues that provide a good first issue. For example, kubernetes/kubernetes has help-wanted issues that should not need deep knowledge of the system. Another good strategy is to find a documentation improvement, such as a missing/broken link, which will give you exposure to the code submission/review process without the added complication of technical depth.

Improvements needed

• Clarify help-wanted issues also exist on projects other than k/kubernetes, e.g. k/kubectl.

Find a SIG that is related to your contribution

You may have noticed that some repositories in the Kubernetes Organization are owned by Special Interest Groups, or SIGs. We organize the Kubernetes community into SIGs in order to improve our workflow and more easily manage what is a very large community project. SIGs also have their own CONTRIBUTING.md files, which may contain extra information or guidelines in addition to these general ones. These are located in the SIG specific community documentation directories, for example: sig-docs' is in the kubernetes/community repo's /sig-docs/CONTRIBUTING.md file and similarly for other SIGs.

After finding something to contribute, you should find the appropriate SIG, which you will need in order to have your pull request approved for testing and merging. See Open A Pull Request below.

Improvements needed

• File issues with all the SIGs to not have duplicate things in their CONTRIBUTING.md. Keep it light, keep it clean, have only one source of truth.

• Do not overload people with the entirety of the SIG structure; it is very intimidating to a newcomer

• Possible text to elaborate on (the sig list should remain in its current place however):

  • (Pick a SIG, peruse its associated cmd directory, find a main() and read code until you find something you want to fix.)

File an Issue

Not ready to contribute code, but see something that needs work? While the community encourages everyone to contribute code, it is also appreciated when someone reports an issue (aka problem). There are multiple repositories within the Kubernetes community and a full list of repositories can be found here. Issue should be reported to an appropriate repository instead of always reporting to the kubernetes/kubernetes repository. For example, a documentation issue should be opened to kubernetes/website. Make sure to adhere to the prompted submission guidelines while opening an issue.

Note that, you should not open issue for a question. While you are learning or playing with Kubernetes you may run into questions. Opening an issue for a question unnecessarily increases the total numbers of issues and creates load on the triage team. Ask question on Stack Overflow, ServerFault or on the appropriate Kubernetes Slack Channel.

Contributing

(From:here)

Kubernetes is open source, but many of the people working on it do so as their day job. In order to avoid forcing people to be "at work" effectively 24/7, we want to establish some semi-formal protocols around development. Hopefully these rules make things go more smoothly. If you find that this is not the case, please complain loudly.

As a potential contributor, your changes and ideas are welcome at any hour of the day or night, weekdays, weekends, and holidays. Please do not ever hesitate to ask a question or send a pull request.

Our community guiding principles on how to create great code as a big group are found here. Beginner focused information can be found below in Open a Pull Request and Code Review.

Communication

It is best to contact your SIG for issues related to the SIG's topic. Your SIG will be able to help you much more quickly than a general question would. Each SIG has a kubernetes slack channel that you can join as well.

For questions and troubleshooting, please feel free to use any of the methods of communication listed here. The kubernetes website also lists this information.

GitHub workflow

To check out code to work on, please refer to this guide.

Improvements needed

• move github workflow into its own file in this folder.

Open a Pull Request

Pull requests are often called simply "PR". Kubernetes generally follows the standard github pull request process, but there is a layer of additional kubernetes specific (and sometimes SIG specific) differences.

The first difference you'll see is that a bot will begin applying structured labels to your PR.

The bot may also make some helpful suggestions for commands to run in your PR to facilitate review. These /command options can be entered in comments to trigger auto-labeling and notifications. The command reference is here.

Common new contributor PR issues are:

• not having correctly signed the CLA ahead of your first PR (see Sign the CLA section)
• finding the right SIG or reviewer(s) for the PR (see Code Review section) and following any SIG specific contributing guidelines
• dealing with test cases which fail on your PR, unrelated to the changes you introduce (see Test Flakes)

The pull request workflow is described in detail here.

Code Review

For a brief description of the importance of code review, please read On Code Review. There are two aspects of code review: giving and receiving.

To make it easier for your PR to receive reviews, consider the reviewers will need you to:

• write good commit messages
• break large changes into a logical series of smaller patches which individually make easily understandable changes, and in aggregate solve a broader issue
• label PRs with appropriate SIGs and reviewers: to do this read the messages the bot sends you to guide you through the PR process

Reviewers, the people giving review, are highly encouraged to revisit the Code of Conduct and must go above and beyond to promote a collaborative, respectful Kubernetes community. When reviewing PRs from others The Gentle Art of Patch Review suggests an iterative series of focuses which is designed to lead new contributors to positive collaboration without inundating them initially with nuances:

• Is the idea behind the contribution sound?
• Is the contribution architected correctly?
• Is the contribution polished?

Testing

Testing is the responsibility of all contributors and is in part owned by all sigs, but is also coordinated by sig-testing.

The main testing overview document is here.

There are three types of test in kubernetes. The location of the test code varies with type, as does the specifics of the environment needed to successfully run the test:

• Unit: These confirm that a particular function behaves as intended. Golang includes native ability for unit testing via the testing package. Unit test source code can be found adjacent to the corresponding source code within a given package. For example: functions defined in kubernetes/cmd/kubeadm/app/util/version.go will have unit tests in kubernetes/cmd/kubeadm/app/util/version_test.go. These are easily run locally be any developer on any OS.
• Integration: These tests cover interactions of package components or interactions between kubernetes components and some other non-kubernetes system resource (eg: etcd). An example would be testing whether a piece of code can correctly store data to or retrieve data from etcd. Integration tests are stored in kubernetes/test/integration/. Running these can require the developer set up additional functionality on their development system.
• End-to-end ("e2e"): These are broad tests of overall kubernetes system behavior and coherence. These are more complicated as they require a functional kubernetes cluster built from the sources to be tested. A separate document here details e2e testing and test cases themselves can be found in kubernetes/test/e2e/.

Continuous integration will run these tests either as pre-submits on PRs, post-submits against master/release branches, or both. The results appear on testgrid.

sig-testing is responsible for that official infrastructure and CI. The associated automation is tracked in the test-infra repo. If you're looking to run e2e tests on your own infrastructure, kubetest is the mechanism.

Security

Improvements needed

• Please help write this section.

Documentation

Improvements needed

• Please help write this section.

Issues Management or Triage

Have you ever noticed the total number of open issues? This number at any given time is typically high. Helping to manage or triage these open issues can be a great contribution to the Kubernetes project. This is also a great opportunity to learn about the various areas of the project. Refer to the Kubernetes Issue Triage Guidelines for more information.

Community

If you haven't noticed by now, we have a large, lively, and friendly open-source community. We depend on new people becoming members and regular code contributors, so we would like you to come join us. To find out more about our community structure, different levels of membership and code contributors, please explore here.

Improvements needed

• The top level k/community/README.md should be a good starting point for what the community is and does. (see above instructions on rewriting this file)

Events

Kubernetes is the main focus of CloudNativeCon/KubeCon, held twice per year in EMEA and in North America. Information about these and other community events is available on the CNCF events pages.

Meetups

Improvements needed

• include link to meetups
• information on CNCF support for founding a Meetup

KubeCon

Improvements needed

• write friendly blurb about KubeCon, and include links

Mentorship

Improvements needed

• Link and mini description for Kubernetes Pilots should go here.