The Rust-Lightning project operates an open contributor model where anyone is welcome to contribute towards development in the form of peer review, documentation, testing and patches.
Anyone is invited to contribute without regard to technical experience, "expertise", OSS experience, age, or other concern. However, the development of cryptocurrencies demands a high-level of rigor, adversarial thinking, thorough testing and risk-minimization. Any bug may cost users real money. That being said, we deeply welcome people contributing for the first time to an open source project or pick up Rust while contributing. Don't be shy, you'll learn.
Communication about Rust-Lightning happens primarily on #ldk-dev on the LDK slack, but also #rust-bitcoin on IRC Freenode.
Discussion about code base improvements happens in GitHub issues and on pull requests.
Major projects are tracked here. Major milestones are tracked here.
First and foremost, start small.
This doesn't mean don't be ambitious with the breadth and depth of your contributions but rather understand the project context and culture before investing an asymmetric number of hours on development compared to your merged work.
Even if you have an extensive open source background or sound software engineering skills, consider that the reviewers' comprehension of the code is as much important as technical correctness.
It's very welcome to ask for review, either on IRC or LDK Slack. And also for reviewers, it's nice to provide timelines when you hope to fulfill the request while bearing in mind for both sides that's a "soft" commitment.
If you're eager to increase the velocity of the dev process, reviewing other contributors work is the best you can do while waiting review on yours.
The codebase is maintained using the "contributor workflow" where everyone without exception contributes patch proposals using "pull requests". This facilitates social contribution, easy testing and peer review.
To contribute a patch, the worflow is a as follows:
- Fork Repository
- Create topic branch
- Commit patches
In general commits should be atomic and diffs should be easy to read. For this reason do not mix any formatting fixes or code moves with actual code changes. Further, each commit, individually, should compile and pass tests, in order to ensure git bisect and other automated tools function properly.
When adding a new feature, like implementing a BOLT spec object, thought must be given to the long term technical debt. Every new features should be covered by functional tests.
When refactoring, structure your PR to make it easy to review and don't hestitate to split it into multiple small, focused PRs.
The Minimal Supported Rust Version is 1.30.0 (enforced by our Travis and GitHub Actions).
Commits should cover both the issue fixed and the solution's rationale. These guidelines should be kept in mind.
To facilitate communication with other contributors, the project is making use of GitHub's "assignee" field. First check that no one is assigned and then comment suggesting that you're working on it. If someone is already assigned, don't hesitate to ask if the assigned party or previous commenters are still working on it if it has been awhile.
Anyone may participate in peer review which is expressed by comments in the pull request. Typically reviewers will review the code for obvious errors, as well as test out the patch set and opine on the technical merits of the patch. PR should be reviewed first on the conceptual level before focusing on code style or grammar fixes.
Use tabs. If you want to align lines, use spaces. Any desired alignment should display fine at any tab-length display setting.
Our CI enforces clippy's default linting
settings.
This includes all lint groups except for nursery, pedantic, and cargo in addition to allowing the following lints:
erasing_op, never_loop, if_same_then_else.
If you use rustup, feel free to lint locally, otherwise you can just push to CI for automated linting.
rustup component add clippy
cargo clippySecurity is the primary focus of Rust-Lightning; disclosure of security vulnerabilites helps prevent user loss of funds. If you believe a vulnerability may affect other Lightning implementations, please inform them.
Note that Rust-Lightning is currently considered "pre-production" during this time, there is no special handling of security issues. Please simply open an issue on Github.
Related to the security aspect, Rust-Lightning developers take testing very seriously. Due to the modular nature of the project, writing new functional tests is easy and good test coverage of the codebase is an important goal. Refactoring the project to enable fine-grained unit testing is also an ongoing effort.
Fuzzing is heavily encouraged: you will find all related material under fuzz/
Mutation testing is work-in-progress; any contribution there would be warmly welcomed.
You can learn more about the C/C++ bindings that are made available by reading the
C/C++ Bindings README. If you are not using the C/C++ bindings,
you likely don't need to worry about them, and during their early experimental phase we are not
requiring that pull requests keep the bindings up to date (and, thus, pass the bindings_check CI
run). If you wish to ensure your PR passes the bindings generation phase, you should run the
genbindings.sh script in the top of the directory tree to generate, build, and test C bindings on
your local system.
You may be interested by Jon Atack guide on How to review Bitcoin Core PRs and How to make Bitcoin Core PRs. While there are differences between the projects in terms of context and maturity, many of the suggestions offered apply to this project.
Overall, have fun :)