The OpenTelemetry .NET special interest group (SIG) meets regularly. See the OpenTelemetry community repo for information on this and other language SIGs.
See the public meeting notes for a summary description of past meetings. To request edit access, join the meeting or get in touch on Slack.
Even though, anybody can contribute, there are benefits of being a member of our community. See to the community membership document on how to become a Member, Approver and Maintainer.
If you are looking for someone to help you find a starting point and be a resource for your first contribution, join our Slack channel and find a buddy!
- Create your CNCF Slack account and join the otel-dotnet channel.
- Post in the room with an introduction to yourself, what area you are interested in (check issues marked with help wanted), and say you are looking for a buddy. We will match you with someone who has experience in that area.
Your OpenTelemetry buddy is your resource to talk to directly on all aspects of contributing to OpenTelemetry: providing context, reviewing PRs, and helping those get merged. Buddies will not be available 24/7, but is committed to responding during their normal contribution hours.
You can contribute to this project from a Windows, macOS or Linux machine.
On all platforms, the minimum requirements are:
- Git client and command line tools.
- .NET 6.0+
- Visual Studio 2022+ for Mac or Visual Studio Code
Mono might be required by your IDE but is not required by this project. This is
because unit tests targeting .NET Framework (i.e: net462
) are disabled outside
of Windows.
- Visual Studio 2022+ or Visual Studio Code
- .NET Framework 4.6.2+
It is critical to keep public API surface small and clean. This repository is
using Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.PublicApiAnalyzers
to validate the public APIs.
This analyzer will check if you changed a public property/method so the change
will be easily spotted in pull request. It will also ensure that OpenTelemetry
doesn't expose APIs outside of the library primary concerns like a generic
helper methods.
- Create a folder in your project called
.publicApi
with the frameworks that as folders you target. - Create two files called
PublicAPI.Shipped.txt
andPublicAPI.Unshipped.txt
in each framework that you target. - Add the following lines to your csproj:
<ItemGroup>
<AdditionalFiles Include=".publicApi\$(TargetFramework)\PublicAPI.Shipped.txt" />
<AdditionalFiles Include=".publicApi\$(TargetFramework)\PublicAPI.Unshipped.txt" />
</ItemGroup>
- Use IntelliSense to update the publicApi files.
Everyone is welcome to contribute code to opentelemetry-dotnet
via GitHub pull
requests (PRs).
To create a new PR, fork the project in GitHub and clone the upstream repo:
git clone https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet.git
Navigate to the repo root:
cd opentelemetry-dotnet
Add your fork as an origin:
git remote add fork https://github.com/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/opentelemetry-dotnet.git
Run tests:
dotnet test
If you made changes to the Markdown documents (*.md
files), install the latest
markdownlint-cli
and run:
markdownlint .
Check out a new branch, make modifications and push the branch to your fork:
$ git checkout -b feature
# edit files
$ git commit
$ git push fork feature
Open a pull request against the main opentelemetry-dotnet
repo.
- If the PR is not ready for review, please mark it as
draft
. - Make sure CLA is signed and all required CI checks are clear.
- Submit small, focused PRs addressing a single concern/issue.
- Make sure the PR title reflects the contribution.
- Write a summary that helps understand the change.
- Include usage examples in the summary, where applicable.
- Include benchmarks (before/after) in the summary, for contributions that are performance enhancements.
A PR is considered to be ready to merge when:
- It has received approval from Approvers. / Maintainers.
- Major feedbacks are resolved.
- It has been open for review for at least one working day. This gives people reasonable time to review.
- Trivial change (typo, cosmetic, doc, etc.) doesn't have to wait for one day.
- Urgent fix can take exception as long as it has been actively communicated.
Any Maintainer can merge the PR once it is ready to merge. Note, that some PRs may not be merged immediately if the repo is in the process of a release and the maintainers decided to defer the PR to the next release train.
If a PR has been stuck (e.g. there are lots of debates and people couldn't agree on each other), the owner should try to get people aligned by:
- Consolidating the perspectives and putting a summary in the PR. It is recommended to add a link into the PR description, which points to a comment with a summary in the PR conversation.
- Tagging subdomain experts (by looking at the change history) in the PR asking for suggestion.
- Reaching out to more people on the CNCF OpenTelemetry .NET Slack channel.
- Stepping back to see if it makes sense to narrow down the scope of the PR or split it up.
- If none of the above worked and the PR has been stuck for more than 2 weeks, the owner should bring it to the OpenTelemetry .NET SIG meeting.
As with other OpenTelemetry clients, opentelemetry-dotnet follows the opentelemetry-specification.
It's especially valuable to read through the library guidelines.
OpenTelemetry is an evolving specification, one where the desires and use cases are clear, but the method to satisfy those uses cases are not.
As such, contributions should provide functionality and behavior that conforms to the specification, but the interface and structure is flexible.
It is preferable to have contributions follow the idioms of the language rather than conform to specific API names or argument patterns in the spec.
For a deeper discussion, see this spec issue.
This project includes a .editorconfig
file which is
supported by all the IDEs/editor mentioned above. It works with the IDE/editor
only and does not affect the actual build of the project.
This repository also includes StyleCop ruleset files under the ./build
folder.
These files are used to configure the StyleCop.Analyzers which runs during
build. Breaking the rules will result in a build failure.