We are glad you want to contribute to the sysctl cookbook! The first step is the desire to improve the project.
- Create an issue on the github issue tracker
- Link to your patch as a rebased git branch or pull request from the ticket
We regularly review contributions and will get back to you if we have any suggestions or concerns.
You should submit your patch as a git branch named after the change.
It is a best practice to have your commit message have a summary line, followed by an empty line and then a brief description of the commit. This also helps other contributors understand the purpose of changes to the code.
Remember that not all users use Chef in the same way or on the same operating systems as you, so it is helpful to be clear about your use case and change so they can understand it even when it doesn't apply to them.
We don't require you to use Github, and we will even take patch diffs attached to tickets on the issue tracker. However Github has a lot of convenient features, such as being able to see a diff of changes between a pull request and the main repository quickly without downloading the branch.
This cookbook is set up to run tests under test-kitchen. It uses serverspec to run integration tests after the node has been converged to verify that the state of the node.
Test kitchen should run completely without exception using the default baseboxes provided by Chef. Because Test Kitchen creates VirtualBox machines and runs through every configuration in the .kitchen.yml file, it may take some time for these tests to complete.
If your changes are only for a specific recipe, run only its configuration with Test Kitchen. If you are adding a new recipe, or other functionality such as a LWRP or definition, please add appropriate tests and ensure they run with Test Kitchen.
If any don't pass, investigate them before submitting your patch.
Any new feature should have unit tests included with the patch with good code coverage to help protect it from future changes. Similarly, patches that fix a bug or regression should have a regression test. Simply put, this is a test that would fail without your patch but passes with it. The goal is to ensure this bug doesn't regress in the future. Consider a regular expression that doesn't match a certain pattern that it should, so you provide a patch and a test to ensure that the part of the code that uses this regular expression works as expected. Later another contributor may modify this regular expression in a way that breaks your use cases. The test you wrote will fail, signalling to them to research your ticket and use case and accounting for it.
If you need help writing tests, please ask on the Chef Developer's mailing list, or the #chef-hacking IRC channel.
Please do include tests for your contribution. If you need help, ask on the chef-dev mailing list or the #chef-hacking IRC channel. Not all platforms that a cookbook supports may be supported by Test Kitchen. Please provide evidence of testing your contribution if it isn't trivial so we don't have to duplicate effort in testing. Chef 10.14+ "doc" formatted output is sufficient.
Please do indicate new platform (families) or platform versions in the commit message, and update the relevant ticket. If a contribution adds new platforms or platform versions, indicate such in the body of the commit message(s).
Please do use foodcritic to lint-check the cookbook. Except FC007, it should pass all correctness rules. FC007 is okay as long as the dependent cookbooks are required for the default behavior of the cookbook, such as to support an uncommon platform, secondary recipe, etc.
Please do ensure that your changes do not break or modify behavior for other platforms supported by the cookbook. For example if your changes are for Debian, make sure that they do not break on CentOS.
Please do not modify the version number in the metadata.rb, the maintainer will select the appropriate version based on the release cycle information above.
Please do not update the CHANGELOG.md for a new version. Not all changes to a cookbook may be merged and released in the same versions. We will update the CHANGELOG.md when releasing a new version of the cookbook.