We are glad you want to contribute to Chef's knife-ec2 plugin! The first step is the desire to improve the project.
You can find the answers to additional frequently asked questions on the wiki.
- Create an account on our bug tracker
- Sign our contributor agreement (CLA) online (keep reading if you're contributing on behalf of your employer)
- Create a ticket for your change on the bug tracker
- Link to your patch as a rebased git branch or pull request from the ticket
- Resolve the ticket as fixed
We regularly review contributions and will get back to you if we have any suggestions or concerns.
Licensing is very important to open source projects, it helps ensure the software continues to be available under the terms that the author desired. Chef uses the Apache 2.0 license to strike a balance between open contribution and allowing you to use the software however you would like to.
The license tells you what rights you have that are provided by the copyright holder. It is important that the contributor fully understands what rights they are licensing and agrees to them. Sometimes the copyright holder isn't the contributor, most often when the contributor is doing work for a company.
To make a good faith effort to ensure these criteria are met, Opscode requires a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) or a Corporate Contributor License Agreement (CCLA) for all contributions. This is without exception due to some matters not being related to copyright and to avoid having to continually check with our lawyers about small patches.
It only takes a few minutes to complete a CLA, and you retain the copyright to your contribution.
You can complete our contributor agreement (CLA) online. If you're contributing on behalf of your employer, have your employer fill out our Corporate CLA instead.
You can file tickets to describe the bug you'd like to fix or feature you'd like to add via the knife-ec2 project. For your contribution to be reviewed and merged, you must file a ticket.
Once you've created the ticket, you can make a pull request to knife-ec2 on GitHub at https://github.com/opscode/knife-ec2 that references that ticket.
To run tests, run the following Ruby tool commands from the root of your local checkout of knife-ec2:
bundle install
bundle exec rspec spec
All tests must pass before your contribution can be merged. Thus it's a good idea to execute the tests without your change to be sure you understand how to run them, as well as after to validate that you've avoided regressions.
All but the most trivial changes should include at least one unit test case to exercise the new / changed code; please add tests to your pull request in this common case.
Knife-ec2 uses the Fog gem to interact with EC2's API. When there's a new feature of EC2 that you'd like to utilize in knife-ec2 use cases, that feature will probably be exposed by Fog. You can read about Fog at its project page.