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Contributing to Tremor

Thanks for your interest in contributing to the Tremor project!!

There are many ways to contribute, and we appreciate all of them.

We have tried to list some tasks or activities based on different types of contributions, irrespective of if you are a user, a developer, a writer, or a designer.

We would like to thank you for spending time on the project and contemplating contributing! If you need any guidance or support making your contribution, our community is ready to assist you and can be reached directly via our chat or through our issue tracking-system.

Contributing as a User​

As a user, even without writing code there are a number of ways to contribute to tremor.

Feature Requests​

Please file an Enhancement request to request a change to the way that Tremor works, or an addition to what it is capable of. Depending on the size, complexity or impact you may be asked to provide a RFC for the request.

Bug Reports​

While bugs are unfortunate, they're a reality in software. We can't fix what we don't know about, so please report liberally. If you're not sure if something is a bug or not, feel free to file a bug anyway.

If you believe reporting your bug publicly represents a security risk to Tremor users, please follow our instructions for reporting security vulnerabilities.

Before reporting a bug, please search existing issues, as it's possible that someone else has already reported your error. This doesn't always work, and sometimes it's hard to know what to search for, so consider this extra credit. We won't mind if you accidentally file a duplicate report.

Similarly, to help others who encountered the bug find your issue, consider filing an issue with a descriptive title, which contains information that might be unique to it. This can be the language or compiler feature used, the conditions that trigger the bug, or part of the error message if there is any. An example could be: "impossible case reached" on match expression in tremor scripting language.

To open an issue is as follow this link and fill out the fields.

Here's a template that you can use to file a bug, though it's not necessary to use it exactly:

    <short summary of the bug>

    I tried this:

    <sample that causes the bug>

    I expected to see this happen: <explanation>

    Instead, this happened: <explanation>

    ## Meta

    `tremor-script --version`:

    Backtrace:

All three components are important: what you did, what you expected,and what happened instead. Please include the output of tremor --version, which includes important information about what platform you're on, what version of Rust you're using, etc.

Sometimes, a backtrace is helpful, and so including that is nice. To get a backtrace, set the RUST_BACKTRACE environment variable to a value other than 0. The easiest way to do this is to invoke tremor like this:

$ RUST_BACKTRACE=1 tremor ...

Contributing as a Developer​

The Build System​

For info on how to configure and build the project, please see the tremor build guide. This guide contains info for contributions to the project and the standard facilities. It also lists some really useful commands to the build system, which could save you a lot of time.

Pull Requests​

Pull requests are the primary mechanism we use to change Tremor. GitHub itself has some great documentation on using the Pull Request feature. We use the "fork and pull" model described here, where contributors push changes to their personal fork and create pull requests to bring those changes into the source repository.

Please make pull requests against the main branch.

Tremor follows a no merge policy, meaning, when you encounter merge conflicts you are expected to always rebase instead of merge. E.g. always use rebase when bringing the latest changes from the main branch to your feature branch. Also, please make sure that fix-up commits are squashed into other related commits with meaningful commit messages.

GitHub allows closing issues using keywords. This feature should be used to keep the issue tracker tidy. However, it is generally preferred to put the "closes #123" text in the PR description rather than the issue commit; particularly during rebasing, citing the issue number in the commit can "spam" the issue in question.

All pull requests are reviewed by another person.

If you want to request that a specific person reviews your pull request, you can tag them in the pull request description or in comments.

For example, Sharon Koech and Darach Ennis usually review documentation changes. So if you were to make a documentation change, tag one or both in your pull request. You may also wish to tag other contributors or other community members as appropriate.

    @skoech @darach

You can tag or add the github usernames preceded by an @ or at symbol in the content body of your pull request submission. This is entirely optional. If you have no preference this is fine too. We aim to work through pull requests as fast as possible and we monitor continuously for new requests.

Once someone has reviewed your pull request, they will approve the pull request - leaving a comment so that you are notified - or some changes may be requested.

For example - tremor uses pedantic lint checks and obeys the rust formatting tool. Our CI/CD system runs automated checks that cover these and other things so we require these checks to go green and to pass. Sometimes it takes a few tweaks before they go green and this is ok. We sometimes forget too - this is why we have the checks automated!

Once your merge request is approved it will enter the merge queue.

Speaking of tests, Rust has a comprehensive test suite. More information about it can be found here.

External Dependencies​

Currently building the Tremor project will also build the following external projects:

We do not allow tests to break, or code coverage to reduce. We recommend running the test suite and adding any relevant tests to cover any added or changed code and removing tests for code that has been removed.

$ cargo test --all

Code coverage will be setup and executed on your behalf by the build system and reports generated that you can navigate.

Issue Triage​

Sometimes, an issue will stay open, even though the bug has been fixed. And sometimes, the original bug may go stale because something has changed in the meantime.

It can be helpful to go through older bug reports and make sure that they are still valid. Load up an older issue, double check that it's still true, and leave a comment letting us know if it is or is not. The least recently updated sort is good for finding issues like this.

Out-of-tree Contributions​

There are a number of other ways to contribute to Tremor that don't deal with this repository.

Answer questions in the community chat.

Participate in the RFC process.

Contributing as a Technical Writer​

As a technical writer, we have begun to document work on an information architecture, and have migrated from multiple subdomains - each with individually maintained sets of content using different documentation and static website frameworks to a single consolidated experience.

We generally produce documentation as markdown and we use the docusaurus framework for quickly building an optimized web experience.

This migration is still an ongoing work in progress - if you are a technical writer or documentation expert - this is an area that we are actively improving and your help could be extremely beneficial to the Tremor project.

Work with existing documentation tasks​

You can look at the current open issues for tasks to pick up in the world of documentation. Some of these tasks are based on a technical writer assessment conducted by Celeste Horgan of the CNCF by request of the Tremor project maintainers, others have been generated organically from the community.

A great way to contribute to Tremor is by picking one of these tasks and contributing with help and support from the team.

Submit or refresh a guide​

Guides are a combination of tutorials and working examples of different ways tremor can be used. They aim to teach a certain concept of tremor and at the same time lead the user through configuring an example usecase where those concepts could be used.

Work with existing code​

Sometimes we discover the need to extend, enhance or improve documentation based on user feedback, or based on issues reported in the primary rust-based tremor codebase.

To find issues that related to documentation tasks, issues in the primary or other tremor code repositories, search here .

Contributions are always welcome and can be made directly in this repository.

Work with the RFC Process​

All significant changes, modifications, enhancements and new features to the project, regardless of the originator or contributor must follow the documented RFC process.

As such, all significant new features should be accompanied by new reference documentation, guides, tutorials, quick starts, and other content in addition to the code-level comments and the submitted RFC itself.

This type of content follows a slightly different process as it typically involves a great commitment of time and effort by the primary originator and by the tremor maintainers and community.

For significant contributions, we recommend reaching out to and chatting with the community via our community chat to get started.