GoToSocial/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Hey! Welcome to the CONTRIBUTING.md for GoToSocial :) Thanks for taking a look, that kicks ass.

This document will expand as the project expands, so for now, this is basically a stub.

Contributions are welcome at this point, since the API is fairly stable now and the structure is somewhat coherent.

Check the issues to see if there's anything you fancy jumping in on.

Table Of Contents

• Communications
• Code of Conduct
• Setting up your development environment
  • Stylesheet / Web dev
  • Golang forking quirks
• Setting up your test environment
  • Standalone Testrig with Pinafore
  • Running automated tests
    • SQLite
    • Postgres
    • Both
  • CLI Tests
• Project Structure
• Style
• Linting and Formatting
• Updating Swagger docs
• CI/CD configuration
• Release Checklist
  • What if something goes wrong?
• Building Docker containers
  • With GoReleaser
  • Manually
• Financial Compensation

Communications

Before starting on something, please comment on an issue to say that you're working on it, and/or drop into the GoToSocial Matrix room here.

This is the recommended way of keeping in touch with other developers, asking direct questions about code, and letting everyone know what you're up to.

Code of Conduct

In lieu of a fuller code of conduct, here are a few ground rules.

1. We DO NOT ACCEPT PRs from right-wingers, Nazis, transphobes, homophobes, racists, harassers, abusers, white-supremacists, misogynists, tech-bros of questionable ethics. If that's you, politely fuck off somewhere else.
2. Any PR that moves GoToSocial in the direction of surveillance capitalism or other bad fediverse behavior will be rejected.
3. Don't spam the general chat too hard.

Setting up your development environment

To get started, you first need to have Go installed. GtS is currently using Go 1.19, so you should take that too. See here.

Once you've got go installed, clone this repository into your Go path. Normally, this should be ~/go/src/github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial.

Once that's done, you can try building the project: ./scripts/build.sh. This will build the gotosocial binary.

If there are no errors, great, you're good to go!

For automatic re-compiling during development, you can use nodemon:

nodemon -e go --signal SIGTERM --exec "go run ./cmd/gotosocial --host localhost testrig start || exit 1"

Stylesheet / Web dev

To work with the stylesheet for templates, you need Node.js and Yarn.

To install Yarn dependencies:

yarn install --cwd web/source

To recompile bundles:

BUDO_BUILD=1 node web/source 

Or you can run live reloading in development. It will start a webserver (ip/port printed in console, default localhost:8081), while also keeping the bundles up-to-date on disk. You can access the user/admin panels at localhost:8080/user, localhost:8080/admin, or run in tandem with the GoToSocial testrig, which will also serve the updated bundles from disk.

NODE_ENV=development node web/source

Golang forking quirks

One of the quirks of Golang is that it relies on the source management path being the same as the one used within go.mod and in package imports within individual Go files. This makes working with forks a bit awkward.

Let's say you fork GoToSocial to github.com/yourgithubname/gotosocial, and then clone that repository to ~/go/src/github.com/yourgithubname/gotosocial. You will probably run into errors trying to run tests or build, so you might change your go.mod file so that the module is called github.com/yourgithubname/gotosocial instead of github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial. But then this breaks all the imports within the project. Nightmare! So now you have to go through the source files and painstakingly replace github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial with github.com/yourgithubname/gotosocial. This works OK, but when you decide to make a pull request against the original repo, all the changed paths are included! Argh!

The correct solution to this is to fork, then clone the upstream repository, then set origin of the upstream repository to that of your fork.

See this blog post for more details.

In case this post disappears, here are the steps (slightly modified):

Fork the repository on GitHub or set up whatever other remote git repo you will be using. In this case, I would go to GitHub and fork the repository.

Now clone the upstream repo (not the fork):

mkdir -p ~/go/src/github.com/superseriousbusiness && git clone git@github.com:superseriousbusiness/gotosocial ~/go/src/github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial

Navigate to the top level of the upstream repository on your computer:

cd ~/go/src/github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial

Rename the current origin remote to upstream:

git remote rename origin upstream

Add your fork as origin:

git remote add origin git@github.com/yourgithubname/gotosocial

Setting up your test environment

GoToSocial provides a testrig with a number of mock packages you can use in integration tests.

One thing that isn't mocked is the Database interface because it's just easier to use an in-memory SQLite database than to mock everything out.

Standalone Testrig with Pinafore

You can launch a testrig as a standalone server running at localhost, which you can connect to using something like Pinafore.

To do this, first build the gotosocial binary with ./scripts/build.sh.

Then, launch the testrig by invoking the binary as follows:

GTS_DB_TYPE="sqlite" GTS_DB_ADDRESS=":memory:" ./gotosocial --host localhost:8080 testrig start

To run Pinafore locally in dev mode, first clone the Pinafore repository, and then run the following command in the cloned directory:

yarn run dev

The Pinafore instance will start running on localhost:4002.

To connect to the testrig, navigate to http://localhost:4002 and enter your instance name as localhost:8080.

At the login screen, enter the email address zork@example.org and password password. You will get a confirmation prompt. Accept, and you are logged in as Zork.

Note the following constraints:

• Since the testrig uses an in-memory database, the database will be destroyed when the testrig is stopped.
• If you stop the testrig and start it again, any tokens or applications you created during your tests will also be removed. As such, you need to log out and in again every time you stop/start the rig.
• The testrig does not make any actual external HTTP calls, so federation will not work from a testrig.

Running automated tests

There are a few different ways of running tests. Each requires the use of the -p 1 flag, to indicate that they should not be run in parallel.

SQLite

If you would like to run tests as quickly as possible, using an SQLite in-memory database, use:

GTS_DB_TYPE="sqlite" GTS_DB_ADDRESS=":memory:" go test ./...

Postgres

If you want to run tests against a Postgres database running on localhost, run:

GTS_DB_TYPE="postgres" GTS_DB_ADDRESS="localhost" go test -p 1 ./...

In the above command, it is assumed you are using the default Postgres password of postgres.

Both

Finally, to run tests against both database types one after the other, use:

./scripts/test.sh

CLI Tests

In ./test/envparsing.sh there's a test for making sure that CLI flags, config, and environment variables get parsed as expected.

Although this test is part of the CI/CD testing process, you probably won't need to worry too much about running it yourself. That is, unless you're messing about with code inside the main package in cmd/gotosocial, or inside the config package in internal/config.

Project Structure

For project structure, GoToSocial follows a standard and widely accepted project layout defined here. As the author writes:

This is a basic layout for Go application projects. It's not an official standard defined by the core Go dev team; however, it is a set of common historical and emerging project layout patterns in the Go ecosystem.

Most of the crucial business logic of the application is found inside the various packages and subpackages of the internal directory.

Where possible, we prefer more files and packages of shorter length that very clearly pertain to definable chunks of application logic, rather than fewer but longer files: if one .go file is pushing 1,000 lines of code, it's probably too long.

Style

It is a good idea to read the short official Effective Go page before submitting code: this document is the foundation of many a style guide, for good reason, and GoToSocial more or less follows its advice.

Another useful style guide that we try to follow: this one.

In addition, here are some specific highlights from Uber's Go style guide which agree with what we try to do in GtS:

• Group Similar Declarations.
• Reduce Nesting.
• Unnecessary Else.
• Local Variable Declarations.
• Reduce Scope of Variables.
• Initializing Structs.

Linting and Formatting

Before you submit any code, make sure to run go fmt ./... to update whitespace and other opinionated formatting.

We use golangci-lint for linting, which allows us to catch style inconsistencies and potential bugs or security issues, using static code analysis.

If you make a PR that doesn't pass the linter, it will be rejected. As such, it's good practice to run the linter locally before pushing or opening a PR.

To do this, first install the linter following the instructions here.

Then, you can run the linter with:

golangci-lint run

If there's no output, great! It passed :).

Updating Swagger docs

GoToSocial uses go-swagger to generate Swagger API documentation from code annotations.

You can install go-swagger following the instructions here.

If you change Swagger annotations on any of the API paths, you can generate a new Swagger file at ./docs/api/swagger.yaml by running:

swagger generate spec --scan-models --exclude-deps -o docs/api/swagger.yaml

CI/CD configuration

GoToSocial uses Drone for CI/CD tasks like running tests, linting, and building Docker containers.

These runs are integrated with GitHub, and will be run on opening a pull request or merging into main.

The Drone instance for GoToSocial is here.

The drone.yml file is here — this defines how and when Drone should run. Documentation for Drone is here.

It is worth noting that the drone.yml file must be signed by the Drone admin account to be considered valid. This must be done every time the file is changed. This is to prevent tampering and hijacking of the Drone instance. See here.

To sign the file, first install and setup the drone cli tool. Then, run:

drone -t PUT_YOUR_DRONE_ADMIN_TOKEN_HERE -s https://drone.superseriousbusiness.org sign superseriousbusiness/gotosocial --save

Release Checklist

First things first: If this is a security hot-fix, we'll probably rush through this list, and make a prettier release a few days later.

Now, with that out of the way, here's our Checklist.

GoToSocial follows Semantic Versioning. So our first concern on the Checklist is:

• What version are we releasing?

Next we need to check:

• Do the assets have to be rebuilt and committed to the repository.
• Do the swagger docs have to be rebuilt?

On the project management side:

• Are there any issues that have to be moved to a different milestone?
• Are there any things on the Roadmap that can be ticked off?

Once we're happy with our Checklist, we can create the tag, and push it. And the rest is automation.

We can now head to GitHub, and add some personality to the release notes. Finally, we make announcements on the all our channels that the release is out!

What if something goes wrong?

Sometimes things go awry. We release a buggy release, we forgot something ­ something important.

If the release is so bad that it's unusable ­ or dangerous! ­ to a great part of our user-base, we can pull. That is: Delete the tag.

Either way, once we've resolved the issue, we just start from the top of this list again. Version numbers are cheap. It's cheap to burn them.

Building Docker containers

For both of the below methods, you need to have Docker buildx installed.

With GoReleaser

GoToSocial uses the release tooling GoReleaser to make multiple-architecture + Docker builds simple.

GoReleaser is also used by GoToSocial for building and pushing Docker containers.

Normally, these processes are handled by Drone (see CI/CD above). However, you can also invoke GoReleaser manually for things like building snapshots.

To do this, first install GoReleaser.

Then install GoSwagger as described in the Swagger section.

Then install Node and Yarn as described in Stylesheet / Web dev.

Finally, to create a snapshot build, do:

goreleaser --rm-dist --snapshot

If all goes according to plan, you should now have a number of multiple-architecture binaries and tars inside the ./dist folder, and snapshot Docker images should be built (check your terminal output for version).

Manually

If you prefer a simple approach to building a Docker container, with fewer dependencies (go-swagger, Node, Yarn), you can also just build in the following way:

./scripts/build.sh && docker buildx build -t superseriousbusiness/gotosocial:latest .

The above command first builds the gotosocial binary, then invokes Docker buildx to build the container image.

If you want to build a docker image for a different CPU architecture without setting up buildx (for example for ARMv7 aka 32-bit ARM), first modify the Dockerfile by adding the following lines to the top (but don't commit this!):

# When using buildx, these variables will be set by the tool:
# https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/builder/#automatic-platform-args-in-the-global-scope
# However, declaring them as global build arguments like this allows them to be set manually with `--build-arg` instead. 
ARG BUILDPLATFORM
ARG TARGETPLATFORM

Then, you can use the following command:

GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm ./scripts/build.sh && docker build --build-arg BUILDPLATFORM=linux/amd64 --build-arg TARGETPLATFORM=linux/arm/v7 -t superseriousbusiness/gotosocial:latest .

See also: exhaustive list of GOOS and GOARCH values

And: exhaustive list of possible values for docker's --platform

Financial Compensation

Right now, there's no structure in place for financial compensation for pull requests and code. This is simply because there's no money being made on the project, apart from the very small weekly Liberapay donations.

If money starts coming in, I'll start looking at proper financial structures, but for now, code is considered to be a donation in itself.