How to contribute to Arlon

Team Arlon welcomes and encourages everyone to participate in its development via pull requests on GitHub.

We prefer to take in pull requests to our active development branch i.e. the main branch. To report a bug or request a feature, we rely on GitHub issues. There are a number of points to keep in mind when submitting a feature request, reporting a bug or contributing in the development of Arlon.

1. Before making a feature request, or reporting a bug please browse through the existing open issues to be sure that it hasn't been already tracked.
2. If a feature request is subsumed by some other open issue, please add your valuable feedback as a comment to the issue.
3. If a bug discovered by you is already being tracked, please provide additional information as you see fit(steps to reproduce, particulars of the environment, version information etc.) as a comment.
4. Before submitting code for a new feature(or a complex, untracked bugfix) please create a new issue. This issue needs to undergo a review process which may involve a discussion on the same GitHub issue to discuss possible approaches and motivation for the said proposal.
5. Please reach out to us on Slack for discussions, help, questions and the roadmap.

Code changes

Open a pull request (PR) on GitHub following the typical GitHub workflow here. Most of the new code changes are merged to the main branch except backports, bookkeeping changes, library upgrades and some bugs that manifest only a particular version. Before contributing new code, contributors are encouraged to either write unit tests, e2e tests or perform some form of manual validation as a sanity-check. Please adhere to standard good practices for Golang and do ensure that the code is properly formatted and vet succeeds, for which we have fmt and vet targets respectively.

Since Arlon is a growing project, various areas require improvements- improving code coverage with unit tests, e2e tests (since v0.10), documentation, CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions are a few to name, we highly encourage to contribute to those areas to start with.

Issues / Bug reports

We track issues on GitHub. You are encouraged to browse through these, add relevant feedback, create new issues or participate in the development. If you are interested in a particular issue or feature request, please leave a comment to reach out to the team. In particular, the issues labeled as help wanted are a great starting point for adding code changes to the project.

Documentation

The documentation for Arlon is hosted on Read the Docs and comprises of contents from the "docs" directory of Arlon source.

For making changes to the documentation, please follow the below steps:

1. Fork the Arlon repository on GitHub and make the desired changes.
2. Prerequisites
   1. Ensure that python3, pip3 is installed.
   2. Optionally, create a venv by running python3 -m venv ./venv to create a virtual environment if you don't have one.
   3. From the root of the Arlon repository, run pip3 install -r docs/requirements.txt to install mkdocs and other pre-requisites.
3. To test your local changes, run mike serve from the repository root.
   1. This starts a local server to host the documentation website where you can preview the changes.
4. To publish the changes, just push the changes to your fork repository and open a PR (pull request).
5. Once your PR is accepted by one of the maintainers/ owners of Arlon project, the Arlon website will be updated.