We made CockroachDB source-available to empower developers to fix and extend the product to better meet their needs.  Nothing thrills us more than people so passionate about the product that they‘re willing to spend their own time to learn the codebase and give back to the community. We created this doc so we can support contributors in a way that doesn’t sacrifice precious bandwidth that we use to serve our users and otherwise meet our business goals.

How to contribute

Before you start a project:

1. Evaluate the complexity of your project to decide how to start work.
2. See Getting and building CockroachDB from source to set up your dev environment.
3. Follow a few code reviews.
4. See our Go (Golang) coding guidelines to learn about our code style and conventions.
5. If it's your first time, check Your first CockroachDB PR. 

Resources on this wiki

Here you will find resources about how to make changes to CockroachDB.

• Reporting bugs in CockroachDB
• Evaluate the complexity of your project
  • Low-complexity projects
  • Medium-complexity projects
  • High-complexity projects
• What is a Good CockroachDB PR
  • Your first CockroachDB PR
• Code reviews
  • Submitting your contribution
  • Working as a reviewer
  • What to expect when you're expecting (someone to review your code at CRL)
• Engineering standards
  • Decomposing changes and updating PRs during reviews
  • Code commenting guidelines
  • Marking features as "not yet implemented"
  • Updating Go dependencies
  • Backporting a change to a release branch
  • Git Commit Messages
    • Release notes
  • Go (Golang) coding guidelines
    • Error concepts and handling in CockroachDB
      • Error handling basics
    • Organization of code into packages
    • Go function argument patterns
  • Can I still commit/merge code if there is still work left to do?
  • Log and error redactability
• Productivity Tips
  • Multiple GOPATHs
  • Ben's Go Emacs Setup
  • Radu's vim setup
  • Git diff side by side
  • Rando scripts
  • CLA Assistant glitch in PRs
  • Using ccache to speed up builds
• Getting and building CockroachDB from source
  • Building from source on macOS
  • Developing with Bazel
  • How to ensure your code builds with Bazel