Contributing

Thank you for considering contributing to Dragonchain!

User feedback is critical to producing the best possible product. Please use our GitHub issues tracker to report bugs or request features.

We accept community contributions, but cannot accept every PR. To ensure your changes are accepted, we recommend first creating an issue and following up with your PR after discussing details with the team.

Using the issue tracker

The issue tracker is the preferred channel for bug reports, features requests and submitting pull requests, but please respect the following restrictions:

Please do not use the issue tracker for personal support requests (use Stack Overflow or email support@dragonchain.com.
Please do not derail or troll issues. Keep the discussion on topic and respect the opinions of others.

Bug reports

A bug is a demonstrable problem that is caused by the code in the repository. Good bug reports are extremely helpful - thank you!

Guidelines for bug reports:

Use the GitHub issue search – check if the issue has already been reported.
Check if the issue has been fixed – try to reproduce it using the latest master branch in the repository.
Isolate the problem – try as much as possible to isolate the individual issue that is occurring, and provide relevant details on the issue.

A good bug report shouldn’t leave gaps or require others to ask for more information. Be as detailed as possible in your report. What is your environment? What are the steps to reproduce the issue? What runtime and OS experience the problem? What did you expect to be the outcome? All these details will help when we find and fix bugs.

Example:

Short and descriptive example bug report title

A summary of the issue and the OS in which it occurs. If suitable, include the steps required to reproduce the bug.

This is the first step

This is the second step

Further steps, etc.

Any other information you want to share that is relevant to the issue being reported. This might include the lines of code that you have identified as causing the bug, and potential solutions (and your opinions on their merits).

Feature requests

Feature requests are welcome. But take a moment to find out whether your idea fits with the scope and aims of the project. It’s up to you to make a strong case to convince the project’s developers of the merits of this feature. Please provide as much detail and context as possible.

Pull requests

Good pull requests - patches, improvements, new features - are a fantastic help. They should remain focused in scope and avoid containing unrelated commits.

Please ask first before embarking on any significant pull request (e.g. implementing features, refactoring code, porting to a different language), otherwise you risk spending a lot of time working on something that the project’s developers might not want to merge into the project.

Please adhere to the coding conventions as best as possible.

Follow this process if you’d like your work considered for inclusion in the project:

Fork the project, clone your fork, and configure the remotes:

# Clone your fork of the repo into the current directory
git clone https://github.com/<your_github_username>/dragonchain
# Navigate to the newly cloned directory
cd dragonchain
# Assign the original repo to a remote called "upstream"
git remote add upstream https://github.com/dragonchain/dragonchain

If you cloned a while ago, get the latest changes from upstream:
```
git checkout master
git pull upstream master
```
Create a new topic branch (off the main project’s master branch) to contain your feature, change, or fix:
```
git checkout -b <topic-branch-name>
```
Commit your changes in logical chunks. Please adhere to good git commit message guidelines or your code is unlikely be merged into the main project. Use Git’s interactive rebase feature to tidy up your commits before making them public.
Add tests and documentation for your new or changed code.
Update the changelog with your changes.
Locally merge (or rebase) the upstream development branch into your topic branch:
```
git pull [--rebase] upstream master
```
Ensure that all checks pass. Running ./tools.sh full-test from the root of the repository will run all PR checks locally.
Push your topic branch up to your fork:
```
git push origin <topic-branch-name>
```
Open a Pull Request with a clear title and description.

Coding Conventions

We use tools to automatically enforce general coding style/guidelines across our codebase. These tools can be installed into python with pip using the dev_requirements.txt file and ran using the tools.sh script.

These automatic linting and formatting rules do not cover all cases of styling. When in doubt, adhere to the Google python style guide and follow the conventions of the surrounding code.

Additionally, because we use mypy for static python type checking, ensure that your code has appropriate PEP 484 in-line type hints. This helps catch typing bugs and while using Python’s dynamic typing.

License

By contributing, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Bounty Programs

Want to make some money for helping the project?

We have project, bug, and security bounty programs which we invite anyone to participate in. Details for these programs can be found here: