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Contributing to osbuild-composer

First of all, thank you for taking the time to contribute to osbuild-composer. In this document you will find information that can help you with your contribution. For more information feel free to read our developer guide.

Running from sources​

We recommend using the latest stable Fedora for development but latest minor release of RHEL/CentOS 8 should work just fine as well. To run osbuild-composer from sources, follow these steps:

  1. Clone the repository and create a local checkout:
$ git clone https://github.com/osbuild/osbuild-composer.git
$ cd osbuild-composer
  1. To install the build-requirements for Fedora and friends, use:
$ sudo dnf group install -y 'RPM Development Tools'   # Install rpmbuild
$ sudo dnf builddep -y osbuild-composer.spec          # Install build-time dependencies
$ sudo dnf -y install cockpit-composer             # Optional: Install cockpit integration
$ sudo systemctl start cockpit.socket              # Optional: Start cockpit
  1. Finally, use the following to compile the project from the working directory, install it, and then run it:
$ rm -rf rpmbuild/
$ make rpm
$ sudo dnf -y install rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/*
$ sudo systemctl start osbuild-composer.socket

You can now open https://localhost:9090 in your browser to open cockpit console and check the "Image Builder" section.

Alternatively you can use composer-cli to interact with the Weldr API. We don't have any client for the RCM API, so the only option there is a plain curl.

When developing the code, use go executable to generate, build, run, and test you code [1], alternatively you can use the script tools/prepare-source.sh:

$ go test ./...
$ go build ./...
$ go generate ./...

Testing​

See test/README.md for more information about testing.

Planning the work​

In general we encourage you to first fill in an issue and discuss the feature you would like to work on before you start. This can prevent the scenario where you work on something we don't want to include in our code.

That being said, you are of course welcome to implement an example of what you would like to achieve.

Creating a PR​

The commits in the PR should have these properties:

  • Preferably minimal and well documented
    • Where minimal means: don't do unrelated changes even if the code is obviously wrong
    • Well documented: both code and commit message
    • The commit message should start with the module you work on, like: weldr: , or distro:
  • The code should compile and the composer should start, so that we can run git bisect on it
  • All code should be covered by unit-tests

Notes:​

[1] If you are running macOS, you can still compile osbuild-composer. If it doesn't work out of the box, use -tags macos together with any go command, for example: go test -tags macos ./...