This is a short guide on how to contribute things to rclone.
If you've just got a question or aren't sure if you've found a bug then please use the rclone forum instead of filing an issue.
When filing an issue, please include the following information if possible as well as a description of the problem. Make sure you test with the latest beta of rclone:
- Rclone version (eg output from
rclone -V
) - Which OS you are using and how many bits (eg Windows 7, 64 bit)
- The command you were trying to run (eg
rclone copy /tmp remote:tmp
) - A log of the command with the
-vv
flag (eg output fromrclone -vv copy /tmp remote:tmp
)- if the log contains secrets then edit the file with a text editor first to obscure them
If you find a bug that you'd like to fix, or a new feature that you'd like to implement then please submit a pull request via GitHub.
If it is a big feature then make an issue first so it can be discussed.
You'll need a Go environment set up with GOPATH set. See the Go getting started docs for more info.
First in your web browser press the fork button on rclone's GitHub page.
Now in your terminal
go get -u github.com/rclone/rclone
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/rclone/rclone
git remote rename origin upstream
git remote add origin git@github.com:YOURUSER/rclone.git
Make a branch to add your new feature
git checkout -b my-new-feature
And get hacking.
When ready - run the unit tests for the code you changed
go test -v
Note that you may need to make a test remote, eg TestSwift
for some
of the unit tests.
Note the top level Makefile targets
- make check
- make test
Both of these will be run by Travis when you make a pull request but you can do this yourself locally too. These require some extra go packages which you can install with
- make build_dep
Make sure you
- Add documentation for a new feature.
- Follow the commit message guidelines.
- Add unit tests for a new feature
- squash commits down to one per feature
- rebase to master with
git rebase master
When you are done with that
git push origin my-new-feature
Go to the GitHub website and click Create pull request.
You patch will get reviewed and you might get asked to fix some stuff.
If so, then make the changes in the same branch, squash the commits (make multiple commits one commit) by running:
git log # See how many commits you want to squash
git reset --soft HEAD~2 # This squashes the 2 latest commits together.
git status # Check what will happen, if you made a mistake resetting, you can run git reset 'HEAD@{1}' to undo.
git commit # Add a new commit message.
git push --force # Push the squashed commit to your GitHub repo.
# For more, see Stack Overflow, Git docs, or generally Duck around the web. jtagcat also reccommends wizardzines.com
rclone currently uses GitHub Actions to build and test the project, which should be automatically available for your fork too from the Actions
tab in your repository.
rclone's tests are run from the go testing framework, so at the top level you can run this to run all the tests.
go test -v ./...
rclone contains a mixture of unit tests and integration tests. Because it is difficult (and in some respects pointless) to test cloud storage systems by mocking all their interfaces, rclone unit tests can run against any of the backends. This is done by making specially named remotes in the default config file.
If you wanted to test changes in the drive
backend, then you would
need to make a remote called TestDrive
.
You can then run the unit tests in the drive directory. These tests
are skipped if TestDrive:
isn't defined.
cd backend/drive
go test -v
You can then run the integration tests which tests all of rclone's operations. Normally these get run against the local filing system, but they can be run against any of the remotes.
cd fs/sync
go test -v -remote TestDrive:
go test -v -remote TestDrive: -fast-list
cd fs/operations
go test -v -remote TestDrive:
If you want to use the integration test framework to run these tests all together with an HTML report and test retries then from the project root:
go install github.com/rclone/rclone/fstest/test_all
test_all -backend drive
If you want to run all the integration tests against all the remotes, then change into the project root and run
make test
This command is run daily on the integration test server. You can find the results at https://pub.rclone.org/integration-tests/
Rclone code is organised into a small number of top level directories with modules beneath.
- backend - the rclone backends for interfacing to cloud providers -
- all - import this to load all the cloud providers
- ...providers
- bin - scripts for use while building or maintaining rclone
- cmd - the rclone commands
- all - import this to load all the commands
- ...commands
- docs - the documentation and website
- content - adjust these docs only - everything else is autogenerated
- command - these are auto generated - edit the corresponding .go file
- content - adjust these docs only - everything else is autogenerated
- fs - main rclone definitions - minimal amount of code
- accounting - bandwidth limiting and statistics
- asyncreader - an io.Reader which reads ahead
- config - manage the config file and flags
- driveletter - detect if a name is a drive letter
- filter - implements include/exclude filtering
- fserrors - rclone specific error handling
- fshttp - http handling for rclone
- fspath - path handling for rclone
- hash - defines rclone's hash types and functions
- list - list a remote
- log - logging facilities
- march - iterates directories in lock step
- object - in memory Fs objects
- operations - primitives for sync, eg Copy, Move
- sync - sync directories
- walk - walk a directory
- fstest - provides integration test framework
- fstests - integration tests for the backends
- mockdir - mocks an fs.Directory
- mockobject - mocks an fs.Object
- test_all - Runs integration tests for everything
- graphics - the images used in the website etc
- lib - libraries used by the backend
- atexit - register functions to run when rclone exits
- dircache - directory ID to name caching
- oauthutil - helpers for using oauth
- pacer - retries with backoff and paces operations
- readers - a selection of useful io.Readers
- rest - a thin abstraction over net/http for REST
- vfs - Virtual FileSystem layer for implementing rclone mount and similar
If you are adding a new feature then please update the documentation.
If you add a new general flag (not for a backend), then document it in
docs/content/docs.md
- the flags there are supposed to be in
alphabetical order.
If you add a new backend option/flag, then it should be documented in
the source file in the Help:
field. The first line of this is used
for the flag help, the remainder is shown to the user in rclone config
and is added to the docs with make backenddocs
.
The only documentation you need to edit are the docs/content/*.md
files. The MANUAL.*, rclone.1, web site etc are all auto generated
from those during the release process. See the make doc
and make website
targets in the Makefile if you are interested in how. You
don't need to run these when adding a feature.
Documentation for rclone sub commands is with their code, eg
cmd/ls/ls.go
.
Note that you can use GitHub's online editor for small changes in the docs which makes it very easy.
There are separate instructions for making a release in the RELEASE.md file.
Please make the first line of your commit message a summary of the change that a user (not a developer) of rclone would like to read, and prefix it with the directory of the change followed by a colon. The changelog gets made by looking at just these first lines so make it good!
If you have more to say about the commit, then enter a blank line and carry on the description. Remember to say why the change was needed - the commit itself shows what was changed.
Writing more is better than less. Comparing the behaviour before the change to that after the change is very useful. Imagine you are writing to yourself in 12 months time when you've forgotten everything about what you just did and you need to get up to speed quickly.
If the change fixes an issue then write Fixes #1234
in the commit
message. This can be on the subject line if it will fit. If you
don't want to close the associated issue just put #1234
and the
change will get linked into the issue.
Here is an example of a short commit message:
drive: add team drive support - fixes #885
And here is an example of a longer one:
mount: fix hang on errored upload
In certain circumstances if an upload failed then the mount could hang
indefinitely. This was fixed by closing the read pipe after the Put
completed. This will cause the write side to return a pipe closed
error fixing the hang.
Fixes #1498
rclone uses the go modules support in go1.11 and later to manage its dependencies.
rclone can be built with modules outside of the GOPATH
To add a dependency github.com/ncw/new_dependency
see the
instructions below. These will fetch the dependency and add it to
go.mod
and go.sum
.
GO111MODULE=on go get github.com/ncw/new_dependency
You can add constraints on that package when doing go get
(see the
go docs linked above), but don't unless you really need to.
Please check in the changes generated by go mod
including go.mod
and go.sum
in the same commit as your other changes.
If you need to update a dependency then run
GO111MODULE=on go get -u github.com/pkg/errors
Check in a single commit as above.
In order to update all the dependencies then run make update
. This
just uses the go modules to update all the modules to their latest
stable release. Check in the changes in a single commit as above.
This should be done early in the release cycle to pick up new versions of packages in time for them to get some testing.
If you update a backend then please run the unit tests and the integration tests for that backend.
Assuming the backend is called remote
, make create a config entry
called TestRemote
for the tests to use.
Now cd remote
and run go test -v
to run the unit tests.
Then cd fs
and run go test -v -remote TestRemote:
to run the
integration tests.
The next section goes into more detail about the tests.
Choose a name. The docs here will use remote
as an example.
Note that in rclone terminology a file system backend is called a remote or an fs.
Research
- Look at the interfaces defined in
fs/fs.go
- Study one or more of the existing remotes
Getting going
- Create
backend/remote/remote.go
(copy this from a similar remote)- box is a good one to start from if you have a directory based remote
- b2 is a good one to start from if you have a bucket based remote
- Add your remote to the imports in
backend/all/all.go
- HTTP based remotes are easiest to maintain if they use rclone's rest module, but if there is a really good go SDK then use that instead.
- Try to implement as many optional methods as possible as it makes the remote more usable.
- Use lib/encoder to make sure we can encode any path name and
rclone info
to help determine the encodings neededrclone purge -v TestRemote:rclone-info
rclone info --remote-encoding None -vv --write-json remote.json TestRemote:rclone-info
go run cmd/info/internal/build_csv/main.go -o remote.csv remote.json
- open
remote.csv
in a spreadsheet and examine
Unit tests
- Create a config entry called
TestRemote
for the unit tests to use - Create a
backend/remote/remote_test.go
- copy and adjust your example remote - Make sure all tests pass with
go test -v
Integration tests
- Add your backend to
fstest/test_all/config.yaml
- Once you've done that then you can use the integration test framework from the project root:
- go install ./...
- test_all -backends remote
Or if you want to run the integration tests manually:
- Make sure integration tests pass with
cd fs/operations
go test -v -remote TestRemote:
cd fs/sync
go test -v -remote TestRemote:
- If your remote defines
ListR
check with this alsogo test -v -remote TestRemote: -fast-list
See the testing section for more information on integration tests.
Add your fs to the docs - you'll need to pick an icon for it from
fontawesome. Keep lists of remotes in
alphabetical order of full name of remote (eg drive
is ordered as
Google Drive
) but with the local file system last.
README.md
- main GitHub pagedocs/content/remote.md
- main docs page (note the backend options are automatically added to this file withmake backenddocs
)- make sure this has the
autogenerated options
comments in (see your reference backend docs) - update them with
make backenddocs
- revert any changes in other backends
- make sure this has the
docs/content/overview.md
- overview docsdocs/content/docs.md
- list of remotes in config sectiondocs/content/_index.md
- front page of rclone.orgdocs/layouts/chrome/navbar.html
- add it to the website navigationbin/make_manual.py
- add the page to thedocs
constant
Once you've written the docs, run make serve
and check they look OK
in the web browser and the links (internal and external) all work.
New features (backends, commands) can also be added "out-of-tree", through Go plugins. Changes will be kept in a dynamically loaded file instead of being compiled into the main binary. This is useful if you can't merge your changes upstream or don't want to maintain a fork of rclone.
Usage
- Naming
- Plugins names must have the pattern
librcloneplugin_KIND_NAME.so
. KIND
should be one ofbackend
,command
orbundle
.- Example: A plugin with backend support for PiFS would be called
librcloneplugin_backend_pifs.so
.
- Plugins names must have the pattern
- Loading
- Supported on macOS & Linux as of now. (Go issue for Windows support)
- Supported on rclone v1.50 or greater.
- All plugins in the folder specified by variable
$RCLONE_PLUGIN_PATH
are loaded. - If this variable doesn't exist, plugin support is disabled.
- Plugins must be compiled against the exact version of rclone to work. (The rclone used during building the plugin must be the same as the source of rclone)
Building
To turn your existing additions into a Go plugin, move them to an external repository
and change the top-level package name to main
.
Check rclone --version
and make sure that the plugin's rclone dependency and host Go version match.
Then, run go build -buildmode=plugin -o PLUGIN_NAME.so .
to build the plugin.