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Contributing to osquery
We want to make contributing to osquery as simple and transparent as possible. These guidelines explain the basics of the osquery development process and how you can contribute. Please read these guidelines before submitting your code as they are designed to save you time later on when your code is under review.
Contributing 101
All contributions are submitted via pull requests (PRs) open against the osquery's master branch on GitHub. After being reviewed by the core team and tested by CI, if all is well, they will be pushed to master and the corresponding PR closed.
You can see who the core team is by viewing the team page on the osquery GitHub organization.
If you need help, both the core team and community members are on the
osquery Slack. Feel free to register
using the following link if you haven't
done so yet and get in touch with us. The #code-review Slack
channel has been set up to handle urgent review needs as well as
questions about your PR. Note: prefer to keep discussion about code
changes in the GitHub pull request thread.
The osquery team also hosts regular office hours where the community
is invited to discuss osquery development with the core team. You are
welcome to join. Office hours are announced on our Slack on the
#officehours channel.
Development Process Guidelines
For documentation on building, testing, and formatting code, please review the ReadTheDocs article on building osquery. This CONTRIBUTING guide focuses more on concepts and high level workflow.
Blueprints
If you plan to submit a change to the osquery core, a new big feature, or in general a change that merits discussion, start by opening a Blueprint issue.
A blueprint issue is a standard GitHub issue, tagged with the label #blueprint, which describes your idea, the problem you are solving and how you plan to implement your solution. The goal of the blueprint is to allow both the core team and the community to discuss whether a certain change is desirable and will be accepted, and identify possible problems with the implementation before it even starts.
There aren't strict guidelines on when a blueprint is needed or not,
so you should use your best judgement or just ping the osquery team on
our #core channel on Slack. Here are some examples of changes which
would benefit from a blueprint:
- Change the basic functioning of the query scheduler
- Alter the thrift interfaces
- Reimplement the logger interface
- Add a new plugin type
There isn't either a strict format for the blueprints, but make sure to include what problem you are trying to solve and how you plan to solve it. We can go from that and ask more information if necessary. If you have code already, even if it is only a proof-of-concept that will be dropped later, please submit it as a PR and associate it with the blueprint by mentioning the blueprint issue on the pull request.
Please remember that blueprints are mostly designed to save you time by preventing you from implementing code which won't be accepted or will need to be extensively modified later on. Please use the right template for the issue. Feel free to advertise your blueprint and ask for feedback on Slack.
Pull requests
Do not submit multiple unrelated changes on the same PR. A pull request must represent a single body of work. If your work requires a bug-fix, submit that first on a separate PR, the same goes for refactors. If you can split your work into multiple smaller PRs please also do so. This is of utmost importance to allow fast reviews and to simplify regression tracking, reverts and references.
Start by developing your feature on a feature branch, possibly formatting your code before each commit, and when ready submit a pull request against the osquery master branch. The initial PR should preferably contain a single commit. If you are unfamiliar with GitHub or how pull requests work, GitHub has a very easy to follow guide that teaches you [how to fork the project and submit your first PR] (https://guides.github.com/activities/forking/).
It is helpful if you tag the GitHub issues you are addressing on the
body of your PR description. If your PR is intended to close an issue
keywords (like fixes or closes) as defined on GitHub
Help.
Once you submit your PR, a formatting check and continuous integration
tests will be triggered on the CI systems for the multiple platforms
we support. If all the required checks and tests are successful the
core team will review your PR. If the tests fail or the reviewer
requests changes, please submit those changes by appending new
commits to your feature branch. Avoid amending old commits as
that makes it harder for the reviewer to track your updates. If you
need to keep your PR up-to-date with master the preferred way is to
rebase your
branch on
master and git push with the --force option. Finally, the core
team might help you with getting your PR accepted by pushing directly
to your branch when that makes sense.
Once both the core team and CI are happy with the PR (remember tests need to pass for all of the supported platforms) the PR will be squashed into a single commit and pushed to the master branch. Only the core team can merge pull requests and therefore at least one core team member will always review your PR, however reviews from the community are highly encouraged and desirable.
Finally we try to keep only active PRs open. If your PR is stale we will close it, however if you want to get back to it at a certain point feel free to re-open, or comment on it.
A note about labels
The core team uses labels to tag each and every pull request. If you care about their meaning take a look at labels on GitHub. However, only the core team can label issues and PRs, so you don't need to care too much about this.
Milestones and release versions
We currently do not use any strict versioning scheme and we cut new versions as we feel it makes sense according to the new features implemented, whether critical bug-fixes where merged, the size of the release (i.e. how many commits since last version), etc. We will however keep some near future milestones open and tag each PR with the milestone we think it is going to be merged for.
Milestones are used for larger releases and we might cut patch releases as we go. If your PR is tagged with the next milestone you can expect it to be merged as soon as it is ready. If your PR is tagged with a later milestone we'll only merge it after the previous milestones are closed.
Branches and tags
The osquery repo contains only the master branch which we do our best to keep stable. We don't keep feature or release branches. The master branch will always keep a linear history and no merge commits are allowed. All our releases are tagged.
Bug reports and feature requests
Developing code is not the only way to contribute to osquery. Submitting bug reports and new ideas is also valuable and appreciated.
We use GitHub issues to track bugs and feature requests. To submit a bug report follow the Bug Report template, to submit a feature request use the Feature Request template.
Please only use issues for bug reports or feature requests. If you have deployment questions or issues or a general question about osquery use our Slack instead as you will have better support there. For the fastest result, you should search the available channels and choose the most appropriate one for your question. You should post in the general channel as a last resort.
If you are using a vendor product please use the appropriate channel as we won't be able to support vendor deployments on the non-vendor channels.
Guidelines for contributing features to osquery core
The software housed in this repo is known as osquery core. While there are occasional exceptions, contributions to core should abide by the following osquery guiding principles in order to be accepted:
- osquery does not change the state of the system
- osquery does not create network traffic to third parties
- osquery binaries have a light memory footprint
- osquery minimizes system overhead & maximizes performance
- osquery does not 'shell out' to other binaries for data collection
- The query schema for osquery seeks uniformity between operating systems
For new features that do not align with the mission principles of core, you may build outside of osquery core in separate integrated processes called extensions: https://osquery.readthedocs.io/en/stable/development/osquery-sdk/.
Does my contribution belong in Core or in an Extension?
Belongs in Core:
- Observes guiding principles
- Has been shared with and approved by osquery project maintainers
- Meets osquery's testing and quality standards
Belongs in an extension:
- Might not observe the osquery core guiding principles
- Expands the scope of use for osquery beyond endpoint monitoring
- Integrates with a proprietary or esoteric tool that is not widely applicable
Contributor License Agreement
You must submit a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) before we can accept any of your pull requests. You only need to submit one CLA for any of osquery's open source projects.
This is managed through the Linux Foundations's EasyCLA. It will comment appropriately on your PR.
Technical Steering Committee
As defined by the the osquery charter, the Technical Steering Committee (or TSC for short) is responsible for oversight of the osquery project.
The GitHub Team is the authoritative source, though we maintain the list here as well.
Current Members (in alphabetical order):
- Alessandro -- @alessandrogario
- Nick -- @muffins
- seph -- @directionless
- Teddy -- @theopolis
- Victor -- @groob
- Zach -- @zwass
License
By contributing to osquery you agree that your contributions will be licensed in accordance with the terms specified in the LICENSE file.