Contributing

We welcome bug fixes and patches from 3rd party contributors. Please follow these guidelines if you want to contribute to ArangoDB:

Getting started

Please make sure you have a GitHub account
Please look into the ArangoDB issue tracker on GitHub for similar/identical issues
For bugs: if the bug you found is not yet described in an existing issue, please file a new one. The new issue should include a clear description of the bug and how to reproduce it (including your environment)
For feature requests: please clearly describe the proposed feature, additional configuration options, and side effects
Please let us know if you plan to work an a ticket. This way we can make sure we avoid redundant work
Create a fork our repository. You can use GitHub to do this
Clone the fork to your development box and pull the latest changes from the ArangoDB repository. Please make sure to use the appropriate branch:
- the "devel" branch is normally used for new features
- bug fixes should be done in the "devel" first, before being applied to master or other branches
If missing, install the required prerequisites. They are listed here.
configure and make your local clone. If you intend to modify the parser files, please make sure to activate the --enable-maintainer-mode configure option. In this case, you also need to have Python installed.
Make sure the unmodified clone works locally before making any code changes. You can do so by running the included test suite (i.e. make unittests)
If you intend to do documentation changes, you also must install Doxygen in the most recent version.

Create a new branch in your fork
Develop and test your modifications there
Commit as you like, but preferrably in logical chunks. Use meaningful commit messages and make sure you do not commit unneccesary files (e.g. object files). It is normally a good idea to reference the issue number from the commit message so the issues will get updated automatically with comments
If the modifications change any documented behavior or add new features, document the changes. The documentation can be found in arangod/Documentation directory. To recreate the documentation locally, run make doxygen. This will re-create all documentation files in the Doxygen directory in your repository. You can inspect the documentation in this folder using a text editor or a browser
When done, run the complete test suite and make sure all tests pass
When finished, push the changes to your GitHub repository and send a pull request from your fork to the ArangoDB repository. Please make sure to select the appropriate branches there
You must use the Apache License for your changes