contribute.md

Contribute

go-ipfs is MIT licensed open source software. We welcome contributions big and small! Take a look at the community contributing notes. Please make sure to check the issues. Search the closed ones before reporting things, and help us with the open ones.

Go Guidelines:

Please look and conform to our Go Contribution Guidelines.

General Guidelines:

• See the dev pseudo-roadmap.
• Please adhere to the protocol described in the main ipfs repo, paper, and specs (WIP).
• Please make branches and pull-request, even if working on the main repository.
• Ask questions or talk about things in Issues or #ipfs on freenode.
• Ensure you are able to contribute (no legal issues please-- we'll probably setup a CLA).
• Have fun!

Repository specific guidelines:

Commit messages

Commit messages must start with a short subject line, followed by an optional, more detailed explanatory text which is separated from the summary by an empty line. We use GitCop to check that commit messages are properly written. It checks the following:

• The first line of a commit message, called the subject line should not be more than 80 characters long.

• The commit message should end with the following trailers:

  License: MIT
  Signed-off-by: User Name <email@address>

  where "User Name" is the author's real (legal) name and email@address is one of the author's valid email addresses.

  These trailers mean that the author agrees with the developer certificate of origin and with licensing the work under the MIT license.

  To help you automatically add these trailers, you can run the setup_commit_msg_hook.sh script which will setup a Git commit-msg hook that will add the above trailers to all the commit messages you write.