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Contributing to Terraform

First: if you're unsure or afraid of anything, just ask or submit the issue or pull request anyways. You won't be yelled at for giving your best effort. The worst that can happen is that you'll be politely asked to change something. We appreciate any sort of contributions, and don't want a wall of rules to get in the way of that.

However, for those individuals who want a bit more guidance on the best way to contribute to the project, read on. This document will cover what we're looking for. By addressing all the points we're looking for, it raises the chances we can quickly merge or address your contributions.

Specifically, we have provided checklists below for each type of issue and pull request that can happen on the project. These checklists represent everything we need to be able to review and respond quickly.

HashiCorp, Offical, and Community Providers

We separate providers out into what we call "HashiCorp Providers", "Partner Providers" and "Community Providers".

HashiCorp providers are providers that we dedicate full time engineers to improving, supporting the latest features, and fixing bugs. These are providers we understand deeply and are confident we have the resources to manage ourselves.

Partner providers are providers where we depend on our partners to contribute fixes and enhancements to improve. HashiCorp will run automated tests and ensure these providers continue to work, but will not dedicate full time engineers to add new features to these providers. These providers are available in official Terraform releases, but the functionality is primarily contributed.

All HashiCorp and Partner providers can be found in the (terraform-providers github organization)[https://github.com/terraform-providers]. Any provider issues should be opened in the provider's repository.

Our testing standards are the same for both HashiCorp and Official providers, and HashiCorp runs full acceptance test suites for every provider nightly to ensure Terraform remains stable.

Community Providers are providers that are neither maintained nor tested by HashiCorp. We can make no promises that these providers will work with any given version of Terraform. These providers are not automatically installed by terraform init and instead require manual installation.

We make the distinction between these types of providers to help highlight the vast amounts of community effort that goes in to making Terraform great, and to help contributors better understand the role HashiCorp employees play in the various areas of the code base.

Issues

Issue Reporting Checklists

We welcome feature requests and bug reports. Below you'll find checklists with guidelines for well-formed issues of each type.

Bug Reports

Test against latest release: Make sure you test against the latest released version. It is possible we already fixed the bug you're experiencing.
Search for possible duplicate reports: It's helpful to keep bug reports consolidated to one thread, so do a quick search on existing bug reports to check if anybody else has reported the same thing. You can scope searches by the label "bug" to help narrow things down.
Include steps to reproduce: Provide steps to reproduce the issue, along with your .tf files, with secrets removed, so we can try to reproduce it. Without this, it makes it much harder to fix the issue.
For panics, include crash.log: If you experienced a panic, please create a gist of the entire generated crash log for us to look at. Double check no sensitive items were in the log.

Feature Requests

Search for possible duplicate requests: It's helpful to keep requests consolidated to one thread, so do a quick search on existing requests to check if anybody else has reported the same thing. You can scope searches by the label "enhancement" to help narrow things down.
Include a use case description: In addition to describing the behavior of the feature you'd like to see added, it's helpful to also lay out the reason why the feature would be important and how it would benefit Terraform users.

Questions

Please do not use GitHub to ask questions! Instead:

Search for answers in Terraform documentation
Ask in the Community Forum: Use the community forum for questions not answered by the documentation.
Request an update to the documentation: If you find that the documentation is confusing or incorrect, open an issue (or a pull request) and let us know.

Issue Lifecycle

The issue is reported.
The issue is verified and categorized by a Terraform collaborator. Categorization is done via GitHub labels. We generally use a two-label system of (1) issue/PR type, and (2) section of the codebase. Type is usually "bug", "enhancement", "documentation", or "question", and section can be any of the providers or provisioners or "core".
Unless it is critical, the issue is left for a period of time (sometimes many weeks), giving outside contributors a chance to address the issue.
The issue is addressed in a pull request or commit. The issue will be referenced in the commit message so that the code that fixes it is clearly linked.
The issue is closed. Sometimes, valid issues will be closed to keep the issue tracker clean. The issue is still indexed and available for future viewers, or can be re-opened if necessary.

Pull Requests

Thank you for contributing! Here you'll find information on what to include in your Pull Request to ensure it is accepted quickly.

Pull requests that don't follow the guidelines will be annotated with what they're missing. A community or core team member may be able to swing around and help finish up the work, but these PRs will generally hang out much longer until they can be completed and merged.

Pull Request Lifecycle

You are welcome to submit your pull request for commentary or review before it is fully completed. Please prefix the title of your pull request with "[WIP]" to indicate this. It's also a good idea to include specific questions or items you'd like feedback on.
Once you believe your pull request is ready to be merged, you can remove any "[WIP]" prefix from the title and a core team member will review. Follow the checklists below to help ensure that your contribution will be merged quickly.
One of Terraform's core team members will look over your contribution and either provide comments letting you know if there is anything left to do. We do our best to provide feedback in a timely manner, but it may take some time for us to respond.
Once all outstanding comments and checklist items have been addressed, your contribution will be merged! Merged PRs will be included in the next Terraform release. The core team takes care of updating the CHANGELOG as they merge.
In rare cases, we might decide that a PR should be closed. We'll make sure to provide clear reasoning when this happens.

Checklists for Contribution

There are several different kinds of contribution, each of which has its own standards for a speedy review. The following sections describe guidelines for each type of contribution.

Documentation Update

Because Terraform's website is in the same repo as the code, it's easy for anybody to help us improve our docs.

Reasoning for docs update: Including a quick explanation for why the update needed is helpful for reviewers.
Relevant Terraform version: Is this update worth deploying to the site immediately, or is it referencing an upcoming version of Terraform and should get pushed out with the next release?

New Provider

Implementing a new provider gives Terraform the ability to manage resources in a whole new API. It's a larger undertaking, but brings major new functionality into Terraform.

Terraform Providers are external plugins, not in the Terraform codebase. Please see the Provider Development Program documentation if you are interested in submitting a new provider.

Core Bugfix/Enhancement

We are always happy when any developer is interested in diving into Terraform's core to help out! Here's what we look for in smaller Core PRs.

Unit tests: Terraform's core is covered by hundreds of unit tests at several different layers of abstraction. Generally the best place to start is with a "Context Test". These are higher level test that interact end-to-end with most of Terraform's core. They are divided into test files for each major action (plan, apply, etc.). Getting a failing test is a great way to prove out a bug report or a new enhancement. With a context test in place, you can work on implementation and lower level unit tests. Lower level tests are largely context dependent, but the Context Tests are almost always part of core work.
Documentation updates: If the core change involves anything that needs to be reflected in our documentation, you can make those changes in the same PR. The Terraform website source is in this repo and includes instructions for getting a local copy of the site up and running if you'd like to preview your changes.
Well-formed Code: Do your best to follow existing conventions you see in the codebase, and ensure your code is formatted with go fmt. (The Travis CI build will fail if go fmt has not been run on incoming code.) The PR reviewers can help out on this front, and may provide comments with suggestions on how to improve the code.

Core Feature

If you're interested in taking on a larger core feature, it's a good idea to get feedback early and often on the effort.

Early validation of idea and implementation plan: Terraform's core is complicated enough that there are often several ways to implement something, each of which has different implications and tradeoffs. Working through a plan of attack with the team before you dive into implementation will help ensure that you're working in the right direction. Opening a GitHub issue, or commenting on an existing issue, is a great way to get these conversations started.
Unit tests: Terraform's core is covered by hundreds of unit tests at several different layers of abstraction. Generally the best place to start is with a "Context Test". These are higher level test that interact end-to-end with most of Terraform's core. They are divided into test files for each major action (plan, apply, etc.). Getting a failing test is a great way to prove out a bug report or a new enhancement. With a context test in place, you can work on implementation and lower level unit tests. Lower level tests are largely context dependent, but the Context Tests are almost always part of core work.
Documentation updates: If the core change involves anything that needs to be reflected in our documentation, you can make those changes in the same PR. The Terraform website source is in this repo and includes instructions for getting a local copy of the site up and running if you'd like to preview your changes.
Well-formed Code: Do your best to follow existing conventions you see in the codebase, and ensure your code is formatted with go fmt. (The Travis CI build will fail if go fmt has not been run on incoming code.) The PR reviewers can help out on this front, and may provide comments with suggestions on how to improve the code.

Writing Acceptance Tests

Acceptance Tests Often Cost Money to Run

Because acceptance tests create real resources, they often cost money to run. Because the resources only exist for a short period of time, the total amount of money required is usually a relatively small. Nevertheless, we don't want financial limitations to be a barrier to contribution, so if you are unable to pay to run acceptance tests for your contribution, simply mention this in your pull request. We will happily accept "best effort" implementations of acceptance tests and run them for you on our side. This might mean that your PR takes a bit longer to merge, but it most definitely is not a blocker for contributions.

Running an Acceptance Test

Acceptance tests can be run using the testacc target in the Terraform Makefile. The individual tests to run can be controlled using a regular expression. Prior to running the tests provider configuration details such as access keys must be made available as environment variables.

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