We definitely welcome your patches and contributions to gRPC! Please read the gRPC organization's governance rules and contribution guidelines before proceeding.
If you are new to github, please start by reading Pull Request howto
In order to protect both you and ourselves, you will need to sign the Contributor License Agreement.
Before starting any development work you will need a local copy of the gRPC repository.
How to get your contributions merged smoothly and quickly.
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Create small PRs that are narrowly focused on addressing a single concern. We often times receive PRs that are trying to fix several things at a time, but only one fix is considered acceptable, nothing gets merged and both author's & review's time is wasted. Create more PRs to address different concerns and everyone will be happy.
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For speculative changes, consider opening an issue and discussing it first. If you are suggesting a behavioral or API change, consider starting with a gRFC proposal.
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Provide a good PR description as a record of what change is being made and why it was made. Link to a GitHub issue if it exists.
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Don't fix code style and formatting unless you are already changing that line to address an issue. PRs with irrelevant changes won't be merged. If you do want to fix formatting or style, do that in a separate PR.
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If you are adding a new file, make sure it has the copyright message template at the top as a comment. You can copy over the message from an existing file and update the year.
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Unless your PR is trivial, you should expect there will be reviewer comments that you'll need to address before merging. We expect you to be reasonably responsive to those comments, otherwise the PR will be closed after 2-3 weeks of inactivity.
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Maintain clean commit history and use meaningful commit messages. PRs with messy commit history are difficult to review and won't be merged. Use
rebase -i upstream/master
to curate your commit history and/or to bring in latest changes from master (but avoid rebasing in the middle of a code review). -
Keep your PR up to date with upstream/master (if there are merge conflicts, we can't really merge your change).
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All tests need to be passing before your change can be merged. We recommend you run tests locally before creating your PR to catch breakages early on (see
src/test
) -
Exceptions to the rules can be made if there's a compelling reason for doing so.
We grant Commit Access to contributors based on the following criteria:
- Sustained contribution to the gRPC project.
- Deep understanding of the areas contributed to, and good consideration of various reliability, usability and performance tradeoffs.
- Contributions demonstrate that obtaining Commit Access will significantly reduce friction for the contributors or others.
In addition to submitting PRs, a Contributor with Commit Access can:
- Review PRs and merge once other checks and criteria pass.
- Triage bugs and PRs and assign appropriate labels and reviewers.
The gRPC organization is comprised of multiple repositories and commit access is usually restricted to one or more of these repositories. Some repositories such as the grpc.github.io do not have code, but the same principle of sustained, high quality contributions, with a good understanding of the fundamentals, apply.