At New Relic we welcome community code contributions to the Ruby agent, and have taken effort to make this process easy for both contributors and our development team.
The head of master will generally have New Relic's latest release. However, New Relic reserves the ability to push an edge to the master. If you download a release from this repo, use the appropriate tag. New Relic usually pushes beta versions of a release to a working branch before tagging them for General Availability.
The agent includes a suite of unit tests with each package which should be used to verify your changes don't break existing functionality.
Running the test suite is simple. Just invoke:
$ make testFor most contributions it is strongly recommended to add additional tests which exercise your changes.
This helps us efficiently incorporate your changes into our mainline codebase and provides a safeguard that your change won't be broken by future development.
There are some rare cases where code changes do not result in changed functionality (e.g. a performance optimization) and new tests are not required. In general, including tests with your pull request dramatically increases the chances it will be accepted.
You are welcome to send pull requests to us - however, by doing so you agree that you are granting New Relic a non-exclusive, non-revokable, no-cost license to use the code, algorithms, patents, and ideas in that code in our products if we so choose. Fortunately, you also agree the code is provided as-is and you provide no warranties as to its fitness or correctness for any purpose.
If you have any feedback on how we can make contributing easier, please get in touch at support.newrelic.com and let us know!