# Contributing to Sermant

Welcome to Sermant! This document is a guideline about how to contribute to Sermant.

If you find something incorrect or missing, please leave comments / suggestions.

# Before You Get Started

# Code of Conduct

Please make sure to read and observe our Code of Conduct (opens new window).

# Open Source Contribution Agreement

The Sermant community adopts DCO (Developer Certificate of Origin (opens new window)) as its open source contribution protocol, if you want to participate in community contributions, you need to follow the following steps.

# Register GitHub Account

If you do not have a GitHub account, you need to log in to GitHub and register using an email address. The email address is used to sign DCO and configure the SSH public key.

# Sign DCO

DCO (Developer Certificate of Origin (opens new window)) is a lightweight open source contribution protocol for open source contributors to prove their right to grant projects access to their code.

When submitting code commit using Git CLI, you can use the -s parameter (opens new window) to add a signature. Examples of usage are as follows:

$git commit -s -m 'This is my commit message'

The signature will be part of the submitted commit message in the format:

This is my commit message

Signed off by: Full Name<email>

• If you use IntelliJ IDEA to submit code, you can check the Sign-off commit option in the Commit Change tool box to attach signature information every time you commit. Please refer to the IntelliJ IDEA User Documentation (opens new window) for specific operations.
• If you use Visual Studio Code to submit code, you can check the Git: Always Sign Off option in Settings to attach signature information every time you commit. Please refer to the related pull request of Visual Studio Code (opens new window) for specific operations.

Please confirm that each time you submit a commit, you correctly add a signature and sign the DCO in the above way. Otherwise, your submitted code will not be accepted and integrated into our repository.

# Contributing

Sermant welcome new participants of any role, including user, contributor, committer and PMC.

We encourage new comers actively join in Sermant projects and involving from user role to committer role, and even PMC role. In order to accomplish this, new comers needs to actively contribute in Sermant project. The following paragraph introduce how to contribute in Sermant way.

# Open / Pickup An Issue for Preparation

If you find a typo in document, find a bug in code, or want new features, or want to give suggestions, you can open an issue on GitHub (opens new window) to report it.

If you just want to contribute directly you can choose the issue below.

• Contribution Welcome (opens new window): Heavily needed issue, but currently short of hand.

• good first issue (opens new window): Good for newcomers, new comer can pickup one for warm-up.

We strongly value documentation and integration with other projects such as Spring Cloud, Kubernetes, Dubbo, etc. We are very glad to work on any issue for these aspects.

Please note that any PR must be associated with a valid issue. Otherwise the PR will be rejected.

# Begin Your Contribute

Now if you want to contribute, please create a new pull request.

We use the develop branch as the development branch, which indicates that this is a unstable branch.

Further more, our branching model complies to A successful Git branching model (opens new window). We strongly suggest new comers walk through the above article before creating PR.

Now, if you are ready to create PR, here is the workflow for contributors:

1. Fork to your own

2. Clone fork to local repository

3. Create a new branch and work on it

4. Keep your branch in sync

5. Commit your changes (make sure your commit message concise)

6. Push your commits to your forked repository

7. Create a pull request to develop branch.

When creating pull request:

1. Please follow the pull request template (opens new window).

2. Please create the request to develop branch.

3. Please make sure the PR has a corresponding issue.

4. If your PR contains large changes, e.g. component refactor or new components, please write detailed documents about its design and usage.

5. Note that a single PR should not be too large. If heavy changes are required, it's better to separate the changes to a few individual PRs.

6. After creating a PR, one or more reviewers will be assigned to the pull request.

7. Before merging a PR, squash any fix review feedback, typo, merged, and rebased sorts of commits. The final commit message should be clear and concise.

If your PR contains large changes, e.g. component refactor or new components, please write detailed documents about its design and usage.

# Code Review Guidance

Committers will rotate reviewing the code to make sure all the PR will be reviewed timely and by at least one committer before merge. If we aren't doing our job (sometimes we drop things). And as always, we welcome volunteers for code review.

Some principles:

• Readability - Important code should be well-documented. API should have Javadoc. Code style should be complied with the existing one.

• Elegance - New functions, classes or components should be well designed.

• Testability - 80% of the new code should be covered by unit test cases.

• Maintainability - to be done.

# Now How About Try Become A Committer?

Generally speaking, contribute 8 non-trivial patches and get at least three different people to review them (you'll need three people to support you). Then ask someone to nominate you. You're demonstrating your:

• at least 8 PR and the associated issues to the project,

• ability to collaborate with the team,

• understanding of the projects' code base and coding style, and

• ability to write good code (last but certainly not least)

A current committer nominates you by slacking the team on the Sermant issue with label "nomination"

• your first and last name

• a link to your Git profile

• an explanation of why you should be a committer,

• Elaborate the top 3 PR and the associated issues the nominator has worked with you that can demonstrate your ability.

Two other committer need to second your nomination. If no one objects in 5 working days (China), you're a committer. If anyone objects or wants more information, the committers discuss and usually come to a consensus (within the 5 working days). If issues cannot be resolved, there's a vote among current committers.

In the worst case, this can drag out for two weeks. Keep contributing! Even in the rare cases where a nomination fails, the objection is usually something easy to address like "more patches" or "not enough people are familiar with this person's work."