osquery-1/CONTRIBUTING.md

All osquery development occurs in feature branches and all contributions occur via GitHub Pull Requests. All code must be reviewed, even if it's written by members of the core team, so following the code review process is critical to successful osquery development.

Contributor License Agreement ("CLA")

In order to accept your pull request, we need you to submit a CLA. You only need to do this once to work on any of Facebook's open source projects.

Complete your CLA here: https://code.facebook.com/cla

Git workflow

Please do all of your development in a feature branch, on your own fork of osquery. You should clone osquery normally, like this:

git clone git@github.com:facebook/osquery.git

Then, your "remote" should be set up as follows:

$ cd osquery
$ git remote -v
origin  git@github.com:facebook/osquery.git (fetch)
origin  git@gitHub.com:facebook/osquery.git (push)

Now, use the GitHub UI to fork osquery to your personal GitHub organization. Then, add the remote URL of your fork to git's local remotes:

$ git remote add marpaia git@github.com:marpaia/osquery.git

Now, your "remote" should be set up as follows:

$ git remote -v
marpaia git@github.com:marpaiagitaia/osquery.git (fetch)
marpaia git@github.com:marpaia/osquery.git (push)
origin  git@github.com:facebook/osquery.git (fetch)
origin  git@gitHub.com:facebook/osquery.git (push)

When you're ready to start working on a new feature, create a new branch:

$ git checkout -b my-feature

Write your code and when you're ready to put up a Pull Request, push your local branch to your fork:

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "my awesome feature!"
$ git push -u marpaia my-feature

Visit https://github.com/facebook/osquery and use the web UI to create a Pull Request. Once your pull request has gone through sufficient review and iteration, please squash all of your commits into one commit.

Pull Request workflow

Linking issues

Once you submit your pull request, link the GitHub issue which your Pull Request implements. To do this, if the relevant issue is #7, then simply type "#7" somewhere in the Pull Request description or comments. This links the Pull Request with the issue, which makes things easier to track down later on.

Adding the appropriate labels

To facilitate development, osquery developers adhere to a particular label workflow.

"ready for review" vs "in progress"

Pull Requests are a great way to track the on-going development of an existing feature. For this reason, if you create a Pull Request and it's not ready for review just yet, attach the "in progress" label. If the Pull Request is ready for review, attach the "ready for review" label. Once the "ready for review" label has been applied, a member of the osquery core team will review your Pull Request.

Topic labels

Are you creating a new osquery table? Attach the virtual tables label.

Are you in some way altering build/test infrastructure? Attach the build/test infrastructure label.

Are you fixing a memory leak? Attach the memory leak label.

The pattern here should be pretty obvious. Please put the appropriate effort into attaching the appropriate labels to your Pull Request.

Unit Test expectations

All code that you submit to osquery should include automated tests. See the unit testing guide for instructions on how to create tests.

Memory leak expectations

osquery runs in the context of long running processes. It's critical that there are no memory leaks in osquery code. All code should be thoroughly tested for leaks. See the memory leak testing guide for more information on how to test your code for memory leaks.

When you submit a Pull Request, please consider including the output of a valgrind analysis.

Calling systems tools

If you think that shelling out and executing a bash command is a good idea, it's not.

If you want to call a system executable or call system libraries via a tool, use the underlying C/C++ APIs that the tool uses to implement your functionality. Several tables (kextstat, processes, nvram, last, etc) were created by dissecting core systems tools and using the underlying APIs.

It's worth noting that you should exercise caution when copying code of any kind, especially core systems tools. Often times, core utilities developers recognize that their software will only be executed in the context of short-lived processes. For this reason, there are often memory leaks in the default behavior of these utilities. Put care into ensuring that you don't unknowingly introduce memory leaks into osquery.