We're glad you want to contribute to knife-ec2! The first step is the desire to improve the project.
- Create an account on GitHub.
- Create an account on the Chef Supermarket.
- Become a contributor by signing our Contributor License Agreement (CLA).
- Create a pull request for your change on GitHub.
- The knife-ec2 maintainers will review your change, and either merge the change or offer suggestions.
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, such as when the contributor is doing work for a company.
To make a good faith effort to ensure these criteria are met, Chef requires an Individual CLA or a Corporate CLA for contributions. This agreement helps ensure you are aware of the terms of the license you are contributing your copyrighted works under, which helps to prevent the inclusion of works in the projects that the contributor does not hold the rights to share.
It only takes a few minutes to complete a CLA, and you retain the copyright to your contribution.
You can complete our Individual CLA online. If you're contributing on behalf of your employer and they retain the copyright for your works, have your employer fill out our Corporate CLA instead.
Small contributions such as fixing spelling errors, where the content is small enough to not be considered intellectual property, can be submitted by a contributor as a patch, without a CLA.
As a rule of thumb, changes are obvious fixes if they do not introduce any new functionality or creative thinking. As long as the change does not affect functionality. Some likely examples include the following:
- Spelling / grammar fixes
- Typo correction, white space and formatting changes
- Comment clean up
- Bug fixes that change default return values or error codes stored in constants
- Adding logging messages or debugging output
- Changes to ‘metadata’ files like Gemfile, .gitignore, build scripts, etc.
- Moving source files from one directory or package to another
Whenever you invoke the “obvious fix” rule, please say so in your commit message:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
commit 370adb3f82d55d912b0cf9c1d1e99b132a8ed3b5
Author: juliachild <julia@chef.io>
Date: Wed Sep 18 11:44:40 2015 -0700
Fix typo in the README.
Obvious fix.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chef uses Github Issues to track issues with knife-ec2. Issues should be submitted at https://github.com/chef/knife-ec2/issues/new.
In order to decrease the back and forth in issues, and to help us get to the bottom of them quickly we use the below issue template. You can copy/paste this template into the issue you are opening and edit it accordingly.
### Environment: [Details about the environment such as the Operating System, Ruby release, etc...]
### Scenario:
[What you are trying to achieve and you can't?]
### Steps to Reproduce:
[If you are filing an issue what are the things we need to do in order to repro your problem?]
### Expected Result:
[What are you expecting to happen as the consequence of above reproduction steps?]
### Actual Result:
[What actually happens after the reproduction steps?]
You can copy the knife-ec2 repository to your local workstation by running
git clone git://github.com/chef/knife-ec2.git.
For collaboration purposes, it is best if you create a GitHub account and fork the repository to your own account. Once you do this you will be able to push your changes to your GitHub repository for others to see and use.
You should submit your patch as a git branch named after the Github issue, such as GH-22. This is called a topic branch and allows users to associate a branch of code with the ticket.
It is a best practice to have your commit message have a summary line that includes the ticket number, followed by an empty line and then a brief description of the commit. This also helps other contributors understand the purpose of changes to the code.
[GH-22] - platform_family and style
* use platform_family for platform checking
* update notifies syntax to "resource_type[resource_name]" instead of
resources() lookup
* GH-692 - delete config files dropped off by packages in conf.d
* dropped debian 4 support because all other platforms have the same
values, and it is older than "old stable" debian release
Remember that not all users use Chef in the same way or on the same operating systems as you, so it is helpful to be clear about your use case and change so they can understand it even when it doesn't apply to them.
Additional help with git is available on the Community Contributions page on the Chef Docs site.
knife-ec2 is tested with rspec unit tests to ensure changes don't cause regressions for other use cases. All non-trivial changes must include additional unit tests.
To run the rspec tests run the following commands from the root of the project:
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.
Chef Software regularly reviews code contributions and provides suggestions for improvement in the code itself or the implementation.
The versioning for Chef Software projects is X.Y.Z.
- X is a major release, which may not be fully compatible with prior major releases
- Y is a minor release, which adds both new features and bug fixes
- Z is a patch release, which adds just bug fixes
These resources will help you learn more about Chef and connect to other members of the Chef community:
- Chef Community Guidelines
- Chef Mailing List
- #chef and #chef-hacking IRC channels on irc.freenode.net
- Supermarket site
- Chef Docs
- Chef Software Chef product page
Please do include tests for your contribution. If you need help, ask on the chef-dev mailing list or the #chef-hacking IRC channel. Please provide evidence of testing your contribution if it isn't trivial so we don't have to duplicate effort in testing.
Please do not modify the version number of the gem, Chef will select the appropriate version based on the release cycle information above.
Please do not update the CHANGELOG.md for a new version. Not all
changes may be merged and released in the same versions. Chef Software
will update the CHANGELOG.md when releasing a new version.
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.