CONTRIBUTING.md 4.0 KB

Contributing Guidelines

The following is a set of guidelines for contributing to nginx project. We really appreciate that you are considering contributing!

Table of Contents

Ask a Question

To ask a question, open an issue on GitHub with the label question.

Report a Bug

To report a bug, open an issue on GitHub with the label bug using the available bug report issue template. Before reporting a bug, make sure the issue has not already been reported.

Suggest a Feature or Enhancement

To suggest a feature or enhancement, open an issue on GitHub with the label feature or enhancement using the available feature request issue template. Please ensure the feature or enhancement has not already been suggested.

Open a Discussion

If you want to engage in a conversation with the community and maintainers, we encourage you to use GitHub Discussions.

Submit a Pull Request

Follow this plan to contribute a change to NGINX source code:

  • Fork the NGINX repository
  • Create a branch
  • Implement your changes in this branch
  • Submit a pull request (PR) when your changes are tested and ready for review

Refer to NGINX Development Guide for questions about NGINX programming.

Formatting Changes

  • Changes should be formatted according to the code style used by NGINX; sometimes, there is no clear rule, in which case examine how existing NGINX sources are formatted and mimic this style; changes will more likely be accepted if style corresponds to the surrounding code

  • Keep a clean, concise and meaningful commit history on your branch, rebasing locally and breaking changes logically into commits before submitting a PR

  • Each commit message should have a single-line subject line followed by verbose description after an empty line

  • Limit the subject line to 67 characters, and the rest of the commit message to 76 characters

  • Use subject line prefixes for commits that affect a specific portion of the code; examples include "Upstream:", "QUIC:", or "Core:"; see the commit history to get an idea of the prefixes used

  • Reference issues in the the subject line; if the commit fixes an issue, name it accordingly

Before Submitting

  • The proposed changes should work properly on a wide range of supported platforms

  • Try to make it clear why the suggested change is needed, and provide a use case, if possible

  • Passing your changes through the test suite is a good way to ensure that they do not cause a regression; the repository with tests can be cloned with the following command:

git clone https://github.com/nginx/nginx-tests.git
  • Submitting a change implies granting project a permission to use it under the BSD-2-Clause license

Issue Lifecycle

To ensure a balance between work carried out by the NGINX engineering team while encouraging community involvement on this project, we use the following issue lifecycle:

  • A new issue is created by a community member

  • An owner on the NGINX engineering team is assigned to the issue; this owner shepherds the issue through the subsequent stages in the issue lifecycle

  • The owner assigns one or more labels to the issue

  • The owner, in collaboration with the wider team (product management and engineering), determines what milestone to attach to an issue; generally, milestones correspond to product releases