Contributing

Please do! Thanks for your help! 🎈 Meshery is community-built and welcomes collaboration. Contributors are expected to adhere to the CNCF’s Code of Conduct.

Contributing Guides

Not sure where to start?

Follow these steps and you’ll be right at home.

  1. See the Newcomers Guide for how, where, and why to contribute.

  2. Sign up for a MeshMate to find the perfect Mentor to help you explore the Layer5 projects and find your place in the community:

  • Familiarize yourself with the broader set of community projects (take a look at the Repository Overview: Spend time understanding each of the initiatives through high-level overviews available in the community drive and through discussions with your MeshMate.
  • Identify your area of interest: Use the time with your MeshMate to familiarize yourself with the architecture and technologies used in the projects. Inform your MeshMate of your current skills and what skills you aim to develop.
  • Run Meshery: Put on your user hat and walk-through all of Meshery’s features and functions as a user.
  • Build Meshery: Confirm that you have a usable development environment.
  • Discuss with the community by engaging in the discussion forum.
  • Contribute by grabbing any open issue with the help-wanted label and jump in. If needed, create a new issue. All pull requests should reference an open issue. Include keywords in your pull request descriptions, as well as commit messages, to automatically close issues in GitHub.
  • Fill-in a community member form community member form to gain access to community resources.

General Contribution Flow

To contribute to Meshery, from creating a fork to creating pull request, please follow the basic fork-and-pull request workflow described here.

Signing-off on Commits (Developer Certificate of Origin)

To contribute to this project, you must agree to the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) for each commit you make. The DCO is a simple statement that you, as a contributor, have the legal right to make the contribution.

See the DCO file for the full text of what you must agree to and how it works here. To signify that you agree to the DCO for contributions, you simply add a line to each of your git commit messages:

Signed-off-by: Jane Smith <jane.smith@example.com>

In most cases, you can add this signoff to your commit automatically with the -s or --signoff flag to git commit. You must use your real name and a reachable email address (sorry, no pseudonyms or anonymous contributions). An example of signing off on a commit:

$ git commit -s -m “my commit message w/signoff”

To ensure all your commits are signed, you may choose to add this alias to your global .gitconfig:

~/.gitconfig

[alias]
  amend = commit -s --amend
  cm = commit -s -m
  commit = commit -s

Or you may configure your IDE, for example, Visual Studio Code to automatically sign-off commits for you:

Meshery Contribution Flow

Meshery is written in Go (Golang) and leverages Go Modules. UI is built on React and Next.js. To make building and packaging easier a Makefile is included in the main repository folder.

Relevant coding style guidelines are the Go Code Review Comments and the Formatting and style section of Peter Bourgon’s Go: Best Practices for Production Environments.

Please note: All make commands should be run in a terminal from within the Meshery’s main folder.

Prerequisites for building Meshery in your development environment:

  1. Go version 1.19 must be installed if you want to build and/or make changes to the existing code. The binary go1.19 should be available in your path. If you don’t want to disturb your existing version of Go, then follow these instructions to keep multiple versions of Go in your system.
  2. GOPATH environment variable should be configured appropriately
  3. npm and node should be installed on your machine, node version 19 or higher is not supported right now.
  4. Fork this repository (git clone https://github.com/meshery/meshery.git), and clone your forked version of Meshery to your development environment, preferably outside GOPATH.
  5. golangci-lint should be installed if you want to test Go code, for MacOS and linux users.