# Contributing Guide
* [New Contributor Guide](#contributing-guide)
* [Ways to Contribute](#ways-to-contribute)
* [Find an Issue](#find-an-issue)
* [Ask for Help](#ask-for-help)
* [Pull Request Lifecycle](#pull-request-lifecycle)
* [Pull Request Checklist](#pull-request-checklist)
* [Documentation Style](#documentation-style)
Welcome! We are glad that you want to contribute to our project! 💖
As you get started, you are in the best position to give us feedback on areas of
our project that we need help with including:
* Problems found during setting up a new developer environment
* Gaps in our Quickstart Guide or documentation
* Bugs in our automation scripts
If anything doesn't make sense, or doesn't work when you run it, please open a
bug report and let us know!
## Ways to Contribute
We welcome many different types of contributions including:
* New features
* Builds, CI/CD
* Bug fixes
* Documentation
* Issue Triage
* Answering questions on [Discord]
* Web design
* Communications / Social Media / Blog Posts
* Release management
Not everything happens through a GitHub pull request. Please come to our
[Discord] and let's discuss how we can work together.
## Find an Issue
Issues labelled as ["good first issue"] are suitable for new
contributors. They provide extra information to help you make your first
contribution.
Issues labelled as ["help wanted"] are usually more difficult. We
recommend them for people who aren't core maintainers, but have either made some
contributions already or feel comfortable with starting from more demanding
tasks.
Sometimes there won’t be any issues with these labels. That’s ok! There is
likely still something for you to work on. If you want to contribute but you
don’t know where to start or can't find a suitable issue, you can reach out to
us on [Discord] and we will be happy to help.
Once you see an issue that you'd like to work on, please post a comment saying
that you want to work on it. Something like "I want to work on this" is fine.
## Ask for Help
The best way to reach us with a question when contributing is to ask on:
* The original GitHub issue
* Our [Discord]
## Pull Request Lifecycle
Pull requests are managed by Mergify.
Our process is currently as follows:
1. When you open a PR a maintainer will automatically be assigned for review
1. Make sure that your PR is passing CI - if you need help with failing checks
please feel free to ask!
1. Once it is passing all CI checks, a maintainer will review your PR and you
may be asked to make changes.
1. When you have received an approval from at least one maintainer, your PR will
be merged.
In some cases, other changes may conflict with your PR. If this happens, you
will get notified by a comment in the issue that your PR requires a rebase, and
the `needs-rebase` label will be applied. Once a rebase has been performed, this
label will be automatically removed.
## Logical Grouping of Commits
It is a recommended best practice to keep your changes as logically grouped as
possible within individual commits. If while you're developing you prefer doing
a number of commits that are "checkpoints" and don't represent a single logical
change, please squash those together before asking for a review.
When addressing review comments, please perform an interactive rebase and edit
commits directly rather than adding new commits with messages like
"Fix review comments".
## Commit message guidelines
A good commit message should describe what changed and why.
1. The first line should:
* Contain a short description of the change (preferably 50 characters or less,
and no more than 72 characters)
* Be entirely in lowercase with the exception of proper nouns, acronyms, and
the words that refer to code, like function/variable names
* Be prefixed with the name of the sub crate being changed
Examples:
* `aya: handle reordered functions`
* `aya-bpf: SkSkbContext: add ::l3_csum_replace`
1. Keep the second line blank.
1. Wrap all other lines at 72 columns (except for long URLs).
1. If your patch fixes an open issue, you can add a reference to it at the end
of the log. Use the `Fixes: #` prefix and the issue number. For other
references use `Refs: #`. `Refs` may include multiple issues, separated by a
comma.
Examples:
* `Fixes: #1337`
* `Refs: #1234`
Sample complete commit message:
```txt
subcrate: explain the commit in one line
Body of commit message is a few lines of text, explaining things
in more detail, possibly giving some background about the issue
being fixed, etc.
The body of the commit message can be several paragraphs, and
please do proper word-wrap and keep columns shorter than about
72 characters or so. That way, `git log` will show things
nicely even when it is indented.
Fixes: #1337
Refs: #453, #154
```
## Pull Request Checklist
When you submit your pull request, or you push new commits to it, our automated
systems will run some checks on your new code. We require that your pull request
passes these checks, but we also have more criteria than just that before we can
accept and merge it. Theses requirements are described in the
[Pull Request Template].
It is recommended that you run the integration tests locally before submitting
your Pull Request. Please see [Aya Integration Tests] for more information.
## Documentation Style
If you find an API that is not documented, unclear or missing examples, please
file an issue. If you make changes to the documentation, please read
[How To Write Documentation] and make sure your changes conform to the
format outlined in [Documenting Components].
If you want to make changes to the Aya Book, see the README in the
[book repository].
["good first issue"]: https://github.com/aya-rs/aya/labels/good%20first%20issue
["help wanted"]: https://github.com/aya-rs/aya/labels/help%20wanted
[Aya Integration Tests]: https://github.com/aya-rs/aya/blob/main/test/README.md
[How To Write Documentation]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustdoc/how-to-write-documentation.html
[Documenting Components]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustdoc/how-to-write-documentation.html#documenting-components
[book repository]: https://github.com/aya-rs/book
[Discord]: https://discord.gg/xHW2cb2N6G