Contributing to Rust IPFS

Welcome, and thank you for your interest in contributing to Rust IPFS. Issues and pull requests are encouraged. You can make a difference by tackling any of the following items:

Bug reports, feature requests and general inquiries in the form of issues
Implementing the remaining features and corresponding HTTP endpoints not yet covered. See https://areweipfsyet.rs for info on which those are.
Additional tests (unit, functional, conformance) and CI for existing functionality
Examples, particularly those that showcase Rust's unique capabilities or performance
Any advancements toward no_std support
PRs for issues marked as help wanted or good first issue
Other issues that are not marked as help wanted or good first issue ;)
Documentation
Benchmarks

First Principles

Following these principles in your PRs will greatly increase your chances of a successful merge:

Keep the patch size minimal
Aim for high (but not absolute) code coverage in testing
Add a note in the changelog(s)

By keeping the patch size minimal we hope to avoid difficult to review situations where there are lot of lines changed with only a few necessary changes. If you wish to submit a pull request for reorganizing something, please keep all unnecessary changes out.

For example, if you wanted to change the wording of this CONTRIBUTING.md file and dislike the fact that there is no static word wrap used, please push two separate pull requests to first change the wording, and finally to reformat the file.

Changelogs and their format

We currently maintain two CHANGELOG files:

If your PR includes changes to unixfs/, include a note in the unixfs/CHANGELOG.md. If your PR includes changes elsewhere, include a note in the root CHANGELOG.md.

The changelog format we've used so far in unixfs/CHANGELOG.md is:

# {release version}

Short overview.

* Short overview [#PR_NUMBER]

[#PR_NUMBER]: PR_URL

If you find yourself writing list of things, just make it multiple items in the list, like:

* Short overview, part of [#PR_NUMBER]
* Another thing, part of [#PR_NUMBER]

[#PR_NUMBER]: PR_URL

In the changelog the most recently released version should be first. This changelog format is more free-form than the more familiar separation of fixes and features. We will probably later migrate to more detailed changelogs.

Target Build

Rust IPFS will always target the current stable version of Rust that is released. Our CI/CD tests will reflect this. See instructions here on how to install the rust toolchain.

Compilation is slow, help!

We are still actively developing Rust IPFS, and as such compilation + linking times will vary and in many cases, worsen. This can be mitigated locally by installing the lld linker using your system's package manager.

For example, on Debian systems:

sudo apt install lld

Then in your ~/.cargo/config file:

[build]
rustflags = ["-C", "link-arg=-fuse-ld=lld"]

Including this in the project root would cause the compiler to error out on systems that don't have lld installed, so we have not checked this into source yet.

Contributing

We welcome all forms of contribution. Please open issues and PRs for:

Reporting Bugs
Suggesting Enhancements
Adding new tests
Adding new functionality
Documentation-only updates

Style

Please separate stylistic things into separate PRs than functional changes
Git Commit Messages should lean towards Conventional Commits but will not be enforced
Rust code should conform to rustfmt and clippy before push, as the CI will catch errors there

Security

If you have discovered a security vulnerability, please open an issue. We'd like to handle things as transparently as possible. If you don't feel like this is prudent, please visit us on one of the chat channels via the badges in the README. One of the core contributors will be able to talk to you about the disclosure.

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