CONTRIBUTING.md

Develop Temporal Server

This doc is for contributors to Temporal Server (hopefully that's you!)

Note: All contributors also need to fill out the Temporal Contributor License Agreement before we can merge in any of your changes.

Prerequisites

Build prerequisites

• Go Lang (minimum version required is 1.19):
  • Install on macOS with brew install go.
  • Install on Ubuntu with sudo apt install golang.
• Protocol buffers compiler (only if you are going to change proto files):
  • Install on macOS with brew install protobuf.
  • Download all other versions from protoc release page.
• Temporal CLI tctl
  • Homebrew brew install tctl
  • Go install make update-tctl
  • Or download it from here https://github.com/temporalio/tctl

Runtime (server and tests) prerequisites

• docker
• docker-compose

Note: it is possible to run Temporal server without a docker. If for some reason (for example, performance on macOS) you want to run dependencies on the host OS, please follow the doc.

For Windows developers

For developing on Windows, install Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) and Ubuntu. After that, follow the guidance for installing prerequisites, building, and testing on Ubuntu.

Check out the code

Temporal uses go modules, there is no dependency on $GOPATH variable. Clone the repo into the preferred location:

git clone https://github.com/temporalio/temporal.git

Build

For the very first time build temporal-server and helper tools with simple make command:

make

It will install all other build dependencies and build the binaries.

Further you can build binaries without running tests with:

make bins

Please check the top of our Makefile for other useful build targets.

Run tests

We defined three categories of tests.

• Unit test: Those tests should not have dependencies other than the test target and go mock. We should have unit test coverage as much as possible.
• Integration test: Those tests cover the integration between the server and the dependencies (Cassandra, SQL, ES etc.).
• Functional test: Those tests cover the E2E functionality of Temporal server. They are all under ./tests directory.

Integration and functional tests require runtime dependencies. They can be run with start-dependencies target (uses docker-compose internally). Open new terminal window and run:

make start-dependencies

Before testing on macOS, make sure you increase the file handle limit:

ulimit -n 8192

Run unit tests:

make unit-test

Run all integration tests:

make integration-test

Run all functional tests:

make functional-test

Or run all the tests at once:

make test

You can also run a single test:

go test -v <path> -run <TestSuite> -testify.m <TestSpecificTaskName>

for example:

go test -v github.com/temporalio/temporal/common/persistence -run TestCassandraPersistenceSuite -testify.m TestPersistenceStartWorkflow

When you are done, don't forget to stop docker-compose (with Ctrl+C) and clean up all dependencies:

make stop-dependencies

Run Temporal Server locally

First start runtime dependencies. They can be run with start-dependencies target (uses docker-compose internally). Open new terminal window and run:

make start-dependencies

then create database schema:

make install-schema

and then run the server:

make start

Now you can create default namespace with tctl:

tctl --namespace default namespace register

and run samples from Go and Java samples repos. Also, you can access web UI at localhost:8080.

When you are done, press Ctrl+C to stop the server. Don't forget to stop dependencies (with Ctrl+C) and clean up resources:

make stop-dependencies

Working with pending API changes

If you need to make changes to the gRPC definitions while also working on code in this repo, do the following:

1. Checkout api, api-go, and sdk-go
2. Make your changes to api, commit to a branch.
3. In your copy of api-go:
   1. Initialize submodules: git submodule update --init --recursive
   2. Point api submodule at your branch. If you make more commits to the api repo, run the last command again.

      git submodule set-url proto/api ../api
      git submodule set-branch --branch mystuff proto/api
      git submodule update --remote proto/api

   3. Compile protos: make proto
4. In your copy of sdk-go:
   1. Point go.mod at local api-go:

      replace (
          go.temporal.io/api => ../api-go
      )
      

   2. Compile & fix errors: make bins
5. In this repo:
   1. Initialize submodules: git submodule update --init --recursive
   2. Point api submodule at your branch. If you make more commits to the api repo, run the last command again.

      git submodule set-url proto/api ../api
      git submodule set-branch --branch mystuff proto/api
      git submodule update --remote proto/api

   3. Stage the change: git add -u (otherwise makefile will blow it away)
   4. Point go.mod at local api-go and sdk-go:

      replace (
          go.temporal.io/api => ../api-go
          go.temporal.io/sdk => ../sdk-go
      )
      

   5. Build & fix errors: make proto && make bins

Licence headers

This project is Open Source Software, and requires a header at the beginning of all source files. To verify that all files contain the header execute:

make copyright

Commit Messages And Titles of Pull Requests

Overcommit adds some requirements to your commit messages. At Temporal, we follow the Chris Beams guide to writing git commit messages. Read it, follow it, learn it, love it.

All commit messages are from the titles of your pull requests. So make sure follow the rules when titling them. Please don't use very generic titles like "bug fixes".

All PR titles should start with Upper case and have no dot at the end.