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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Thank you for your interest in contributing to the NEAR reference client! We welcome contributions from everyone. Below are various bits of information to help you get started. If you require additional help, please reach out to us on our zulip channel.

Quick Start

nearcore is a fairly standard Rust project, so building is as easy as

$ cargo build

Building nearcore requires a fairly recent Rust compiler (get it here), as well as clang and cmake to build RocksDB (sudo apt install cmake clang).

Sadly at the moment nearcore is only compatible with Linux and MacOS, Windows is not supported yet.

To run a local NEAR network with one node, use

$ cargo run -p neard -- init # generates various configs in ~/.near
$ cargo run -p neard -- run

You can now use your own node's HTTP RPC API (e.g. httpie)

$ http get http://localhost:3030/status
$ http post http://localhost:3030/ method=query jsonrpc=2.0 id=1 \
     params:='{"request_type": "view_account", "finality": "final", "account_id": "test.near"}'

The RPC is documented here, and can be conveniently accessed from the command line NEAR CLI utility.

Next Steps

To learn more about how nearcore works, skim through our guide to nearcore development:

https://near.github.io/nearcore/

If you are looking for relatively simple tasks to familiarise yourself with nearcore, please check out issues labeled with the C-good-first-issue label here. If you see one that looks interesting and is unassigned or has not been actively worked on in some time, please ask to have the issue assigned to you and someone from the team should help you get started. We do not always keep the issue tracker up-to-date, so if you do not find an interesting task to work on, please ask for help on our zulip channel.

If you have an idea for an enhancement to the protocol itself, please make a proposal by following the NEAR Enhancement Proposal process.

Pull Requests

All the contributions to nearcore happen via Pull Requests. Please follow the following steps when creating a PR:

  1. Fork the nearcore repository and create a new branch there to do your work.
  2. The branch can contain any number of commits. When merged, all commits will be squashed into a single commit.
  3. The changes should be thoroughly tested. Please refer to this document for our testing guidelines and an overview of the testing infrastructure.
  4. When ready, send a pull request against the master branch of the nearcore repository.
  5. Feel free to submit draft PRs to get early feedback and to make sure you are on the right track.
  6. The PR name should follow the template: <type>: <name>. Where type is:
    • fix for bug fixes;
    • feat for new features;
    • refactor for changes that reorganize code without adding new content;
    • doc for changes that change documentation or comments;
    • test for changes that introduce new tests;
    • chore for grunt tasks like updating dependencies.
  7. The PR should also contain a description when appropriate to provide additional information to help the reviewer inspect the proposed change.
  8. If your PR introduces a user-observable change (e.g. a new protocol feature, new configuration option, new Prometheus metric etc.) please document it in CHANGELOG.md in the [unreleased] section.
  9. It is important to select the Allow edits and access to secrets by maintainers checkbox on the PR. Without this option, the merge bot will not have sufficient rights to be able to merge the PR when it is approved. It also allows the maintainers to make trivial changes to the PR as necessary. Please see these links for the implications of selecting the checkbox.

After the PR is submitted

  1. We have a CI process configured to run various tests on each PR. All tests need to pass before a PR can be merged.
  2. When all the comments from the reviewer(s) have been addressed, they should approve the PR allowing a PR to be merged.
  3. Before merging a PR, the code should be reviewed properly. In particular, the person who clicks "Merge when ready" has specific duties, exposed in the last paragraph of the "Code review process" section below.
  4. An approved PR can be merged by clicking the "Merge when ready" button. The button can be clicked by the author if they have the appropriate access, or by a reviewer otherwise. PR authors can also click the button immediately after filing a PR; removing an additional round-trip after the PR gets approved. The PR author will be notified by email by github if the PR fails to land, once it has entered the merge queue (ie. after it has passed PR CI and gotten an approving review).

Code review process

We have two groups of code reviewers: Super owners and normal owners. When a PR is created:

  • a super owner will be automatically assigned to review.
  • they may choose to review the PR themselves or they may delegate to someone else who belongs either to the super owners or the normal owners group.
  • the delegate will perform the review and as needed engage other reviewers as well. They will review your tests, and make sure that they can convince themselves the test coverage is adequate before they even look into the change, so make sure you tested all the corner cases.
  • it is normal to sometimes require multiple rounds of reviews to get a PR merged. If your PR received some feedback from a reviewer, use the github UI to re-request a review.

The author is also free to directly request reviews from specific persons through the github ui. In this case, the automatically selected super owner will ensure that the selected reviewer is sufficient or additional reviewers are needed.

The process for becoming a code reviewer is relatively straightforward. The candidate should have a good understanding of the codebase and then the existing super owners will discuss and approve the addition. These discussions take place on zulip so if you are interested in becoming a code reviewer, please reach out to us there.

The person who clicks the "Merge when ready" button is the one who guarantees that no unreviewed code was added between the approving review and the commit that is being landed. They must be especially careful of commits that might have happened before the review, but not have been reviewed (eg. because the review was already in progress), as they will show above the review line on the GitHub UI. In addition, not refreshing the page might lead to these commits just not displaying, so the reviewer should refresh the page both before and after clicking "Merge when ready," and confirm that the commits are as expected.

Release Schedule

Once your change ends up in master, it will be released with the rest of the changes by other contributors on the regular release schedules.

On betanet we run nightly build from master with all the nightly protocol features enabled. Every five weeks, we stabilize some protocol features and make a release candidate for testnet. The process for feature stabilization can be found in this document. After the release candidate has been running on testnet for four weeks and no issues are observed, we stabilize and publish the release for mainnet.