1# How to contribute
2
3We definitely welcome your patches and contributions to gRPC! Please read the gRPC
4organization's [governance rules](https://github.com/grpc/grpc-community/blob/master/governance.md)
5and [contribution guidelines](https://github.com/grpc/grpc-community/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md) before proceeding.
6
7If you are new to GitHub, please start by reading [Pull Request howto](https://help.github.com/articles/about-pull-requests/)
8
9## Legal requirements
10
11In order to protect both you and ourselves, you will need to sign the
12[Contributor License Agreement](https://identity.linuxfoundation.org/projects/cncf).
13
14## Guidelines for Pull Requests
15How to get your contributions merged smoothly and quickly.
16
17- Create **small PRs** that are narrowly focused on **addressing a single
18 concern**. We often times receive PRs that are trying to fix several things at
19 a time, but only one fix is considered acceptable, nothing gets merged and
20 both author's & review's time is wasted. Create more PRs to address different
21 concerns and everyone will be happy.
22
23- If you are searching for features to work on, issues labeled [Status: Help
24 Wanted](https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Aupdated-desc+label%3A%22Status%3A+Help+Wanted%22)
25 is a great place to start. These issues are well-documented and usually can be
26 resolved with a single pull request.
27
28- If you are adding a new file, make sure it has the copyright message template
29 at the top as a comment. You can copy over the message from an existing file
30 and update the year.
31
32- The grpc package should only depend on standard Go packages and a small number
33 of exceptions. If your contribution introduces new dependencies which are NOT
34 in the [list](https://godoc.org/google.golang.org/grpc?imports), you need a
35 discussion with gRPC-Go authors and consultants.
36
37- For speculative changes, consider opening an issue and discussing it first. If
38 you are suggesting a behavioral or API change, consider starting with a [gRFC
39 proposal](https://github.com/grpc/proposal).
40
41- Provide a good **PR description** as a record of **what** change is being made
42 and **why** it was made. Link to a GitHub issue if it exists.
43
44- If you want to fix formatting or style, consider whether your changes are an
45 obvious improvement or might be considered a personal preference. If a style
46 change is based on preference, it likely will not be accepted. If it corrects
47 widely agreed-upon anti-patterns, then please do create a PR and explain the
48 benefits of the change.
49
50- Unless your PR is trivial, you should expect there will be reviewer comments
51 that you'll need to address before merging. We'll mark it as `Status: Requires
52 Reporter Clarification` if we expect you to respond to these comments in a
53 timely manner. If the PR remains inactive for 6 days, it will be marked as
54 `stale` and automatically close 7 days after that if we don't hear back from
55 you.
56
57- Maintain **clean commit history** and use **meaningful commit messages**. PRs
58 with messy commit history are difficult to review and won't be merged. Use
59 `rebase -i upstream/master` to curate your commit history and/or to bring in
60 latest changes from master (but avoid rebasing in the middle of a code
61 review).
62
63- Keep your PR up to date with upstream/master (if there are merge conflicts, we
64 can't really merge your change).
65
66- **All tests need to be passing** before your change can be merged. We
67 recommend you **run tests locally** before creating your PR to catch breakages
68 early on.
69 - `./scripts/vet.sh` to catch vet errors
70 - `go test -cpu 1,4 -timeout 7m ./...` to run the tests
71 - `go test -race -cpu 1,4 -timeout 7m ./...` to run tests in race mode
72
73- Exceptions to the rules can be made if there's a compelling reason for doing so.