akvorado/CONTRIBUTING.md

New features

New features should be discussed. Open an issue before trying anything major. New features are not free to maintain and put a burden on the maintainers of the project, notably when it comes to fixing bugs and when they interfere with future evolutions.

User friendliness

Network people are usually less savvy when it comes to complex systems. There are three pillars that Akvorado follows to make it easier for its target users:

• docker compose to get started quickly for most setups
• easy upgrades through automatic migrations (database and configuration)
• documentation including configuration, exploitation, and troubleshooting

Style guide

Go formatter takes care of most issues. For the remaining points:

• comments are sentences and should be capitalized
• on the other hand, log messages are not and should not be capitalized
• metrics should be named using Prometheus conventions

Git commits are prefixed with the component and sub-component of the feature: orchestrator/clickhouse: add some feature. Meta-component are also possible, like docs, build, or docker.

Testing

We do not aim for 100% code coverage, however most code should be covered by tests. This is a big task, but it pays when adding new features or refactoring. The test suite should run quick enough to not become a burden.

Use make test-go to run Go tests. You can restrict it to a specific package with make test-go PKG=akvorado/orchestrator/clickhouse. Using just go test would work, but make test-go also runs linting and formatting automatically.

If possible, tests should not rely on external components, but when it becomes hard to do so, it is possible to spawn services through Docker. Locally, one can spawn them through docker compose -f docker/docker-compose-dev.yml:

• ... up clickhouse to spawn a single ClickHouse
• ... up clickhouse-\* to spawn a ClickHouse cluster
• ... up kafka to spawn a Kafka broker

For manual end-to-end tests, you can use make docker-dev to build a Docker container of Akvorado, then use docker compose up to run Docker compose. Beware not to destroy the volume for GeoIP at each attempt as there is a per-day limit on the number of times one IP can fetch the GeoIP database.

If you need to work on the frontend part, you can spawn the Docker compose setup, then in console/frontend, use npm run dev and point your browser to http://localhost:5173 instead of http://localhost:8080. Any change of frontend-related files should be applied immediately. You still need to run a local version of the console service:

$ make && AKVORADO_CFG_CONSOLE_SERVELIVEFS=true ./bin/akvorado console /dev/null

Licensing

The code is licensed under AGPL-3.0-only. When creating new files, be sure to add the appropriate SPDX header, like for existing files. Feel free to assign the copyright to yourself or your organization: we do not do copyright assignment as GitHub terms and conditions already include this:

Whenever you add Content to a repository containing notice of a license, you license that Content under the same terms, and you agree that you have the right to license that Content under those terms.