terraform/CONTRIBUTING.md

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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.

Issues

Reporting an Issue

  • Make sure you test against the latest released version. It is possible we already fixed the bug you're experiencing.

  • Provide your your .tf files, with secrets removed, so we can try to reproduce it. Without this, it makes it much harder to fix the issue.

  • 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.

  • Respond as promptly as possible to any questions made by the Terraform team to your issue. Stale issues will be closed.

Issue Lifecycle

  1. The issue is reported.

  2. The issue is verified and categorized by a Terraform collaborator. Categorization is done via tags. For example, bugs are marked as "bugs".

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. The issue is closed. Somtimes, 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.

Setting up Go to work on Terraform

If you have never worked with Go before, you will have to complete the following steps in order to be able to compile and test Terraform.

  1. Install Go. Make sure the Go version is at least Go 1.2. Terraform will not work with anything less than Go 1.2. On a Mac, you can brew install go to install Go 1.2.

  2. Set and export the GOPATH environment variable and update your PATH. For example, you can add to your .bash_profile.

    export GOPATH=$HOME/Documents/golang
    export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin
    
  3. Follow the development guide

  4. Make your changes to the Terraform source, being sure to run the basic tests.

  5. If everything works well and the tests pass, run go fmt on your code before submitting a pull request.