As a large, open-source project, it can be a struggle to ensure a consistent level of code quality. This style guide is meant to be the canonical reference for all things style: code comments, formatting, acceptable (or unacceptable) crates, data structures, or algorithms, and so on.
In essence, we hope to turn pull request review comments like "why did you do it this way?" or "I think you could try doing it this way" into "we always do X this way: ".
At a high-level, code formatting is straightforward: we use the native rustfmt exclusively, and
comprehensively. All Rust source code within the repository should be formatted using rustfmt.
You can acquire rustfmt -- which is invoked as cargo fmt -- by following the directions listed
out in the rustfmt repository.
Vector has its own formatting rules (.rustfmt.toml) that will automatically be used when you run
cargo fmt within the repository. If you're ever in doubt, you can also run make check-fmt which
will invoke cargo fmt in a dry-run mode, checking to see if any changed files are not currently
formatted correctly.
As an additional note, rustfmt sometimes can fail to format code within macros, so if you happen
to see such code that doesn't look like it's formatted correctly, you may need to manually tweak it
if rustfmt cannot be persuaded to format it correctly for you. :)
When re-typing the same raw string literal more than once, this can lead to typo errors, especially when names ares similar. In general, when reasonable, it is preferred to use Compile-time constants when dealing with non-dynamic strings. For example, when working with field names for event metadata.
As this has not always been a consistently enforced code style for the project, please take the opportunity to update existing raw strings to use constants when modifying existing code
Code is primarily split into two main directories: lib/ and src/.
We use lib almost entirely for shared libraries and for isolating specific pieces of code. As
Vector itself involves a large number of dependencies, it can be beneficial to move code into
isolated crates under lib/ in order to allow them not only to be shared, but also to reduce the
amount of code that must be processed by helper tools like cargo check and rust-analyzer during
normal development, which in turn speeds up the feedback loop between writing code and getting
informed about errors, warnings, and so on.
The bulk of functional code resides in the src/ directory/crate. When we refer to functional
code, we're talking about code that powers user-visible aspects of Vector, such as the sources,
transforms, and sinks themselves. There is also, of course, the requisite glue code such as parsing
command-line arguments, reading the configuration, constructing and configuring components, and
wiring them together.
As a tool for ingesting, transforming, enriching, and shipping observability data, Vector has a significant amount of its own internal telemetry. This telemetry is primarily logging and metrics, but also includes some amount of tracing.
For logging, we use tracing, which doubles as both a
way to emit logs but also a way to use distributed tracing techniques to add nested and contextual
metadata by utilizing spans.
For logging, we use tracing's event macros which should look very similar to almost all other
logging libraries, with names that emulate the logging level being used i.e. info!("A wild log has appeared.");.
All of tracing's event macros -- trace!, debug!, info!, warn!, and error! -- support the
same argument format, which allows logging in some common ways:
// Basic string literal message, no formatting:
info!("Server has started.");
// A formatted message, with the same formatting support as `println!`/`format!`:
debug!("User connected: {}", username);
// Adding structured fields to the even, mixing and matching the message format:
trace!(bytes_sent = 22, "Sent heartbeat packet to client.")`
error!(client_addr = %conn.get_ref().peer_addr, "Client actor received malformed packet: {}", parse_err.to_string())While this does not cover all the permutations of what the macros in tracing support, these
examples represent the preferred style of using the macros.
The tracing event macros support passing the event message itself in a few ways, but we prefer the
fields/message/message arguments order:
// Don't do this:
info!(message = "Something happened.");
// Do this instead:
info!("Something happened.");
// Don't do this:
debug!(%client_id, message = "Client entered authentication phase.");
debug!(message = "Client entered authentication phase.", %client_id);
// Do this instead:
debug!(%client_id, "Client entered authentication phase.");In general, there are both a few rules and a few suggestions to follow when it comes to writing a (good) log message:
- Messages must be written in English. No preference on which specific English dialect is used e.g. American English, British English, Canadian English, etc.
- Sentences must be capitalized, and end with a period.
- Proper spelling and grammar when possible. Not all of us are native English speakers, and so this is simply an ask, but not a hard requirement.
- Identifiers, or passages of note, should be called out by some means i.e. wrapping them in backticks or quotes. Wrapping with special characters can be helpful in drawing the users eye to anything of importance.
- If it's longer than one or two sentences, it's probably better suited as a single sentence briefly explaining the event, with a link to external documentation that explains further.
Similarly, choosing the right level can be important, both from the perspective of making it easy for users to grok what they should pay attention to, but also to avoid the performance overhead of excess logging (even if we filter it out and it never makes it to the console).
-
TRACE: Typically contains a high level of detail for deep/rich debugging.
As trace logging is typically reached for when instrumenting algorithms and core pieces of logic, care should be taken to avoid trace logging being added to tight loops, or commonly used codepaths, where possible. Even when disabled, there can still be a small overhead associated with logging an event at all.
-
DEBUG: Basic information that can be helpful for initially debugging issues.
Should typically not be used for things that happen per-event, or scales with event throughput, but in some cases -- i.e. if it happens every 1000th event, etc -- it can safely be used.
-
INFO: Common information about normal processes.
This includes logical/temporal events such as notifications when components are stopped and started, or other high-level events that, crucially, do not represent an event that an operator needs to worry about.
Said another way, INFO is primarily there for information that lets them know that an action they just took completed successfully, whether that's the server initially starting up successfully, or reloading a configuration successfully, or exiting Vector after receiving SIGTERM.
-
WARN: Something unexpected happened, but no data has been lost, nothing has crashed, and we can recover from it without an issue. An operator might be interested in something at the WARN level, but it shouldn't be informing them of things serious enough to require immediate attention.
-
ERROR: Data loss, unrecoverable errors, and anything else that will require an operator to intervene and recover from. These should be rare so that they maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio in the observability tooling that operators themselves are using.
For metrics, we use metrics, which like tracing,
provides macros for emitting counters, gauges, and histograms.
There are three basic metric types: counters, gauges, and histograms. Counters are meant for counting things, such as the total number of requests processed, where the count only grows over time. This is also sometimes called a monotonic counter, or a monotonically increasing counter. Gauges are for tracking a single value that changes over time, and can go up and down, such as the number of current connections. Histograms are for tracking multiple observations of the same logical event, such as the time it takes to serve a request.
Emitting metrics always involves a metric name and a value being measured. They can optionally accept descriptive labels:
// Counters can be incremented by an arbitrary amount, or `increment_counter!`
// can be used to simply increment by one:
counter!("bytes_sent_total", 212);
increment_counter!("requests_processed_total", "service" => "admin_grpc");
// Gauges can be set to an absolute value, such as setting it to the latest value of an
// external measurement, or it can be incremented and decremented by an arbitrary amount:
gauge!("bytes_allocated", 42.0);
increment_gauge!("bytes_allocated", 2048.0, "table_name" => self.table_name.to_string());
increment_gauge!("bytes_allocated", 512.0, "table_name" => self.table_name.to_string());
decrement_gauge!("bytes_allocated", 2560.0, "table_name" => self.table_name.to_string())
// Histograms simply record a measurement, but there's a fun little trait that `metrics`
// uses called `IntoF64` that lets custom types provide a way to convert themselves to a
// `f64`, which there's a default implementation of for `Duration`:
let delta = Duration::from_micros(750);
histogram!("request_duration_ns", delta);
histogram!("request_duration_ns", 742_130, "endpoint" => "frontend");Many values can appear, at first, to be best tracked as a gauge: current connection count, in-flight request count, and so on. However, in some cases, the value being measured may change too frequently to be reliably tracked. Metrics are typically collected on an interval, which is fine for counters and histograms: they're purely additive. However, since a gauge is simply the latest value, you cannot know how it's changed since the last time you've observed it.
This is a common problem where a gauge tracks something like a queue size. If there's an event where the queue grows rapidly but drains back down quickly, you may not ever observe the gauge having changed if your collection interval is greater than the duration of such events.
A simple pattern to follow to handle these scenarios is to use two counters -- one for the
increments, one for the decrements -- so that you can graph the difference between them, giving you
the equivalent of the "current" value. In our example above, we might have queue_items_pushed and
queued_items_popped, and if queue_items_pushed equals 100, and queued_items_popped equals 80,
we know our queue size is 20. More importantly, if we queried both of them at the same time, and
they were both zero, and then queried them both a second later, and saw that both were 100,000, we
would know that the queue size was currently zero but we'd also know that we just processed
100,000 items in the past second.
- Do attempt to limit the cardinality, or number of unique values, of label values. If the number of unique values for a label grows over time, this can represent a large amount of consumed memory. This is a problem we expect to be fixed in the medium-term (#11995) but is a good rule to follow unless there's a competing reason to do so, such as when following the guidelines in the Component Specification.
- Don't emit metrics in tight loops. Each metric emission carries an overhead, and emitting them in tight loops can cause that overhead to become noticeable in terms of CPU usage and throughput reduction. Instead of incrementing a counter every time a loop iteration occurs, you might consider incrementing a local variable instead, and then emitting that sum after the loop is over.
- Don't update a counter to measure the total number of operations/events/etc if you're already
tracking a histogram of those operations/events/etc. Histograms have a
countproperty that counts how many samples the histogram has recorded, as well as asumproperty that is a sum of the value of all samples the histogram has recorded. This means you can potentially get three metrics for the cost of emitting one.
For error handling, there are two parts: creating errors and working with errors.
For creating errors, we prefer snafu. The snafu crate provides
a derive for generating the boilerplate std::error::Error implementation on your custom error
struct or enum. It additionally provides helpers for defining the Display output for your error
(potentially on a per-variant basis when working with enums).
While there are popular alternatives such as failure and
thiserror, they generally lack either the thoroughness in
documentation or the flexibility of snafu.
For working with errors, we have a more lax approach. At the highest level, we use a boxed trait
approach -- Box<dyn std::error::Error + Send + Sync + 'static> -- for maximum flexibility. This
allows developers to avoid needing to always derive custom error types in order to return errors
back up the call stack. This does not prevent, and indeed, should not discourage developers from
using snafu to create rich error types that provide additional context, whether through
descriptive error messages, source errors, or backtraces.
In general, we strive to use the atomic types in the standard
library when possible, as they are the
most portable and well-tested. In cases where the standard library atomics cannot be used, such as
when using a 64-bit atomic but wanting to support a 32-bit platform, or support a platform without
atomic instructions at all, we prefer to use
crossbeam-utils and its AtomicCell helper. This type will
automatically handle either using native atomic support or ensuring mutually exclusive access, and
handle it in a transparent way. It uses a fixed acquire/release ordering that generally provides the
expected behavior when using atomics, but may not be suitable for usages which require stronger
ordering.
When there is a need or desire to share global state, there are a few options depending on the required constraints.
If you're working with data that never changes after initialization,
we prefer std::sync::OnceLock over once_cell or
lazy_static. It is slightly faster and provides a richer API than
lazy_static, and has equivalent features to the once_cell version.
If you're working with data that changes over time, but has a very high read-to-write ratio, such
as many readers, but one writer and infrequent writes, we prefer
arc-swap. The main feature of this crate is allowing a piece of
data to be atomically updated while being shared concurrently. It does this by wrapping all data in
Arc<T> to provide the safe, concurrent access, while adding the ability to atomically swap the
Arc<T> itself. As it cannot be constructed in a const fashion, arc-swap pairs well with
once_cell for actually storing it in a global static variable.
When there is a need for a concurrent and indexable storage, we prefer
sharded-slab. This crate provides a means to insert items
such that the caller gets back to the index by which it can access the item again in the future.
Additionally, when an item is removed, its storage can be reused by future inserts, making
sharded-slab a good choice for long-running processes where memory allocation reduction is
paramount. There is also a pool data structure based on the same underlying design of the slab
itself for use cases where pooling is desired.
Synchronization can be a very common sight when writing multi-threaded code in any language, and this document does not aim to familiarize you with all of the common synchronization primitives and their intended usage. Instead, however, there are some caveats that you must be aware of when using synchronization primitives in synchronous versus asynchronous code.
Generally speaking, developers will lean on the synchronization primitives in std::sync, such as
Mutex, RwLock, and so on. These are typically the right choice -- in terms of using the ones
provided by std, vs alternative implementations of the same primitives -- as they're well-tested,
and have been improving over time in terms of performance. However, developers must be careful when
using these primitives in asynchronous code, as their behavior can sometimes adversely affect the
performance and correctness of Vector.
To wit, developers must exercise caution when using synchronous (i.e. std::sync, parking_lot,
etc) synchronization primitives in asynchronous code, as they can be used in a way that deadlocks
the asynchronous runtime even though the code compiles and appears to be correct. In some cases,
you'll need to use an asynchronous-specific synchronization primitives, namely the ones from tokio
itself. The documentation on tokio's own
Mutex, for example, calls out the
specifics of when and where you might need to use it vs the one from std::sync.
Vector makes the distinction between configuration items that are essential to understand data
pipelines and runtime flags that determine the details of the runtime behavior. The main configuration
generally lives in a file in the current directory or in /etc/vector.
Examples of main configuration fields are source, transformation, and sink declaration, as well as information about where any disk buffers should be persisted.
For configuration items that purely inform details of Vector's runtime behavior, CLI flags without corresponding configuration fields should be used.
An example of a runtime flag is
vector run --no-graceful-shutdown-limit, which tells Vector to ignore SIGINTs and to continue running
as normal until a SIGKILL is received. In this case, as the configuration describes the desired runtime
behavior in a specific environment and not to the underlying data pipeline, no corresponding field in
the configuration file should exist.