Cryptor Contributing Guide

Table of contents

• Welcome
• Things you'll need
• Before contributing
• How to contribute?
  • Report bugs and issues
  • Propose enhancement or optimizations
  • Propose new features
  • Propose tests
  • How to PR
• Non-code related contributions
  • Documentation
  • Network volunteer
• Continuous Integration
• Organization
  • Labels
  • Projects
• Styleguide
  • Commit Messages
  • Golang Code

Welcome

I am very happy to see you've taken the interest to look at the guidelines for contributing to Cryptor. The topics covered below are simple guidelines and nothing is set in stone, use your judgment to save everyone time, always ask yourself "is X something I would do?", before proposing it.

Please note this is not a Development Guide (an introduction to bits of code and how to handle the project), but a set of instructions and recommendations for getting started with adding changes to the codebase and community. A Developer Guide will be provided on the wiki.

Things you'll need

• Git, version control
• Copy of the project
• Using git, git clone https://git.cpl.li/cryptor
• Using go get, go get cpl.li/go/cryptor
• Fork the project on GitHub
• Download source code as ZIP
• Go programming language
• Installation instructions, source code and releases for the major operating system can be found here
• Check your version by running go version in your terminal
  • Cryptor is being developed to work using v1.12 or later
• To get started with Go I recommend the Go Tour, an interactive tutorial
• You can work from any IDE you prefer, there are no IDE dependencies
  • Certain IDEs are recommended (or certain plugins for your favourite IDE)
• The code style used in all Go source files must respect vet and fmt standards, see this for more information
• Golang FAQ
• Websites for researching packages or documentation

Before contributing

• Check the F.A.Q. over on the wiki
• If you wish, reach out to the community over on Discord.
• Check the issues, projects and PRs for any existing materials
• If in doubt, contact me alexandru@cpl.li (please use Cryptor: in your subject)
• Make sure you have your development setup working and you can run the Cryptor tests (make test)

How to contribute?

Report bugs and issues

In order to open new issues head over to the GitHub issues page and select "New Issue", use the "Bug report" template. Make sure the label bug is used and any other relevant labels (see below).

Propose enhancement or optimizations

Before proposing any enhancement or optimizations have some arguments and demo/prototype/benchmark/... to improve the chances of being considered. These proposals are also created on the GitHub issues page using the "Enhancement/Optimizations Proposal" template. Make sure the right label is used (optimization or enhancement, see explanation below)

Propose new features

Consider the security, privacy and costs of implementing the feature you dream of. After that open a new issue on the GitHub issues page. Use the "Feature request" template and appropriate labels.

Propose tests

Feel free to skip opening an issue for adding or changing tests. You can skip straight to a PR.

How to PR

Not many rules for Pull Requests. Make sure your version is compiling, respecting all language standards, all tests are passing and code is up to the Style Guidelines. After that open a PR and wait 3-5 days. Longer than that, feel free to @ mention me or drop me an email.

Non-code related contributions

Documentation

New documentation, spell checking, overall layout improvements, etc, are all welcome too. Issues can be opened as discussions but I would rather you join the Discord server and discuss ideas openly there.

Network volunteer

The Cryptor Network will require nodes to function and test the initial versions. Any node helps, no matter the hardware, it can be a Raspberry Pi, a supercomputer, a VPS or your home desktop/laptop.

Continuous Integration

The current continuous integration pipeline is simple: * Push changes to GitHub * Travis-CI runs tests and pushes code coverage to coveralls * Coveralls detects any major drop in coverage

Organization

Labels

All issues must be labeled accordingly. You can see the live list of issue labels over here with their respective descriptions. If in doubt don't worry, a collaborator will fix any misused labels.

Projects

Projects and [milestones](https://github.com/cpl/cryptor/milestones_ give a sense of progress and direction to the overall Cryptor project. The boards are basic Kanbans with Backlog (todo), In Progress (doing) and Done for organizing issues and other notes.

Styleguide

Commit Messages

• Pad your commit subject with the package in which the modifications are
• p2p/node: extend SetAddr argument validation to cover special case
• foo/bar/zulu: refactor legacy code to v1.2.3 standards
• Please do not include emojis (or any Unicode runes) in commit messages, I wish for the git history to be accessible in any environment
• Limit the commit subject to 72 characters or less
• Keep the subject simple and clear
• For any message longer than that use the commit description
  • git commit -m "Subject string" -m "Description string"
• Use the present tense and imperative mood
• add test for special case, not added test for ...
• ... to move files ..., not ... that moves files ...
• Use [ci skip] [skip ci] to skip certain CI builds which are mainly documentation or non-sourcecode related, Travis-CI doc

Golang Code

• Respect fmt (link)

  Gofmt formats Go programs. It uses tabs for indentation and blanks for alignment. Alignment assumes that an editor is using a fixed-width font.

• Respect vet

  Vet examines Go source code and reports suspicious constructs, such as Printf calls whose arguments do not align with the format string. Vet uses heuristics that do not guarantee all reports are genuine problems, but it can find errors not caught by the compilers.

• Respect godoc (link)
• Respect gofumpt (link)
• An unofficial backwards compatible (with the official fmt) formatting guideline