The Perl Toolchain Summit needs more sponsors. If your company depends on Perl, please support this very important event.
FERKI / Rex-1.14.1 / CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing guide

Thank you for considering to contribute to Rex! It is a free and open source project developed by volunteers like you from all around the world.

We would like to make sure everyone can make an efficient use of their time. The goal of the guidelines here is to help communication around contributions.

Since most contributions we receive is about code, this guide also focuses a lot on them. But it's far from being the only way you can participate:

All those are equally encouraged and welcome!

Project guidelines

Over the course of years, many decisions were taken around Rex. We found some of the ideas coming up more often than others, so we collected them here (in no particular order).

Getting help and support

If you need help with questions like “How do I…?” and “Why does it…?”, please see our support page for both community and commercial support.

Please use the issue tracker only for bug reports and feature requests.

GitHub issues and pull requests

The first step of any change proposal is to open an issue about it. This gives a chance to discuss the details, and to design potential solutions before spending any effort on the implementation.

To cover the vast majority of typical discussion points in advance, there are predefined templates for issues and pull requests. Please make sure to use them in order to streamline the workflow.

If something comes up that is not a good fit for the templates, that's probably already an early indicator that it should be discussed more closely. In this case please contact us first, or at least provide a reasoning about why the template had to be ignored in that specific case.

Rex core vs extending Rex

Strictly speaking the core competency of Rex is to execute commands, manage files, define tasks, and orchestrate their execution.

Rex gained lots of other capabilities over time, and historically many of them landed in core as well. But it is often possible to extend Rex by only minimally changing the core, if at all. For example this includes adding support to:

It is highly encouraged to add such new capabilities via their own extension modules outside the core. If in doubt, please check some of the common scenarios below, or contact us.

Cross platform support

Rex is expected to run wherever Perl can run. This includes Linux, BSDs, Mac OS X, Windows and possibly others. Patches and guides about how to run Rex on even more platforms are more than welcome!

As a general rule, running Rex is only supported on platforms which are actively maintained by their respective upstream teams.

Supported OSes

Rex is expected to manage endpoints running various operating systems. Today, this mostly means Unix-like systems. Patches and guides about how to manage other operating systems are more than welcome!

As a general rule, managing an endpoint with Rex is only supported for platforms that are actively maintained by their respective upstream teams.

Supported Perl versions

Rex aims to run even on older Perl versions up to 10 years old. Currently this means 5.12.5.

On top of the supported minimum version of Perl, the goal is to support the latest versions of all minor Perl 5 releases. That makes the full list the following:

Backwards compatibility

The goal is to remain backwards compatible within major versions of Rex (which is also implied by following Dotted Semantic Versioning rules).

To still be able to introduce new features while staying backwards compatible, Rex uses feature flags. This makes it possible to selectively opt in or out of new features, depending on the needs of the given use case.

The collection of preferred settings for a specific version of Rex can also be enabled via feature flags named after the minor releases.

The goal is to have pairs of feature flags for opting in and out.

Deprecation policy

Features and code paths may be dropped by following a planned deprecation procedure. In order to provide a transition period for the users, there should be warnings about the deprecation before the behavior is changed.

If a supported OS gets deprecated, we may try to keep it supported while it doesn't cause any problems. As soon a retired OS starts to cause bugs, or gets in the way of progress, it is a candidate to be dropped from support.

In other words, we may choose to be lazy to keep the support around, but it's probably not worth putting effort actively into something that is not supported anymore even by their own creators.

In case you depend on a deprecated feature, or must use or manage a retired OS, you might be interested to get community or commercial support.

Code layout

Rex uses Perl::Tidy to format its codebase according to the rules described in .perltidyrc. All contributions are expected to be formatted using the same rules.

To avoid unnecessary "tidy only" commits, we recommend to integrate formatting directly into your workflow, for example via a git pre-commit hook, or via your editor as a shortcut or automatic action.

It is important to note that the emphasis is not on the formatting rules themselves, but on having a consistent layout throughout the codebase. Since .perltidyrc is part of the repo, it can also be the subject of contributions.

Code quality

Rex uses Test::Perl::Critic::Progressive to make sure every change follows best practices described by the code quality rules in .perlcriticrc, and no new violations are introduced accidentally.

Since .perlcriticrc is part of the repo, it can also be the subject of contributions. In fact, improving the rules and the codebase in this regard is highly welcome.

Tests should pass

Rex has two major test suites:

In general, when adding a new feature or when changing behavior, tests should be added too, and all previous tests should still pass.

In order to make it easier to follow the guidelines listed here, these should also have corresponding tests as well.

Have fun

It is highly important to have fun while using Rex or contributing to it. If it is not the case, then that's probably a bug somewhere, so please let us know.

Development tools

The Rex project uses Git for version control of the source code. The repository is hosted on GitHub.

It is recommended (but optional) to use a separate Perl environment for development, like the ones you can manage with Perlbrew.

The code and examples use cpanm to install modules from CPAN.

Rex uses Dist::Zilla as an authoring tool. With that, installing dependencies can be done by the following commands after cloning the source code:

dzil authordeps | cpanm
dzil listdeps | cpanm

Some of the optional dependencies might not be available on all platforms, but to install them as well, use this command:

dzil listdeps --suggests | cpanm

To install remaining OS-specific dependencies and Rex itself, run:

dzil install

To install the OS-specific dependencies only, run one of these commands depending on your OS:

Perltidy takes care of maintaining a consistent source code formatting.

Perlcritic makes sure the codebase keeps following best practices and minimum quality requirements.

Testing

The test suite included with the source code of Rex can be executed with prove:

prove --lib --recurse t/

Extended, author and release tests may need further dependencies, before being executed with dzil:

dzil listdeps --author --missing | cpanm
dzil test --all

It's particularly important to run the progressive perlcritic tests on the default branch before modifying the code base. This generates baseline data to compare against later:

rm xt/author/.perlcritic-history
prove --lib xt/author/critic-progressive.t

Git workflow

The preferred way for sending contributions is to fork the repository on GitHub, and send pull requests against the default branch of the repository.

It is recommended to use feature branches when working on contributions. This makes it easy to separate the commits related to a specific changeset from the main line of development, while still keeping them together in one place.

Ideally, a single commit:

There are many articles written on the topic, but this is a good example about how to write a git commit message.

It is generally recommended to:

Common scenarios

Add support to manage new operating systems

Allowing Rex to manage a new OS requires the following steps:

  1. Teach rex about how to detect the given OS

    • add a way to Rex::Hardware::Host::get_operating_system() to detect the given OS
    • add a new is_myos() function to Rex::Commands::Gather

  2. Let Rex choose the proper package and service management modules for the given OS

    • modify Rex::Service and Rex::Pkg

  3. Add new service and package management modules specific to the given OS

    • add Rex::Service::MyOS
    • add Rex::Pkg::MyOS

Add support for new virtualization methods

Assuming the new virtualization method is called MyVirt, the following steps are required:

Contribute to this guide

If you think some of the information here is outdated, not clear enough, or have bugs, feel free to contribute to it too!

Useful resources