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How to Contribute to Botkube

We'd love your help!

Botkube is MIT Licensed and accepts contributions via GitHub pull requests. This document outlines conventions on development workflow, commit message formatting, contact points and other resources to make it easier to get your contributions accepted.

We gratefully welcome improvements to documentation as well as to code.

Contributing to documentation​

Follow the botkube-docs/CONTRIBUTING.md file to learn how to contribute to documentation.

Build and run Botkube from source code​

This section describes how to build and run Botkube from source code.

Prerequisite​

  • Go, at least 1.18

  • make

  • Docker

  • Kubernetes cluster, at least 1.21

  • Cloned Botkube repository

    Use the following command to clone it:

    git clone https://github.com/kubeshop/botkube.git

Build and install on Kubernetes​

  1. Build Botkube and create a new container image tagged as ghcr.io/kubeshop/botkube:v9.99.9-dev. Choose one option:

    • Single target build for your local K8s cluster

      This is ideal for running Botkube on a local cluster, e.g. using kind or minikube.

      Remember to set the IMAGE_PLATFORM env var to your target architecture. By default, the build targets linux/amd64.

      For example, the command below builds the linux/arm64 target:

      IMAGE_PLATFORM=linux/arm64 make container-image-single
      docker tag ghcr.io/kubeshop/botkube:v9.99.9-dev {your_account}/botkube:v9.99.9-dev
      docker push {your_account}/botkube:v9.99.9-dev

      Where {your_account} is Docker hub or any other registry provider account to which you can push the image.

    • Multi-arch target builds for any K8s cluster

      This is ideal for running Botkube on remote clusters.

      When tagging your dev image take care to add your target image architecture as a suffix. For example, in the command below we added -amd64 as our target architecture.

      This ensures the image will run correctly on the target K8s cluster.

      Note This command takes some time to run as it builds the images for multiple architectures.

      make container-image
      docker tag ghcr.io/kubeshop/botkube:v9.99.9-dev-amd64 {your_account}/botkube:v9.99.9-dev
      docker push {your_account}/botkube:v9.99.9-dev

      Where {your_account} is Docker hub or any other registry provider account to which you can push the image.

  2. Install Botkube with any of communication platform configured, according to the installation instructions. During the Helm chart installation step, set the following flags:

    export IMAGE_REGISTRY="{imageRegistry}" # e.g. docker.io
    export IMAGE_PULL_POLICY="{pullPolicy}" # e.g. Always or IfNotPresent

    --set image.registry=${IMAGE_REGISTRY} \
    --set image.repository={your_account}/botkube \
    --set image.tag=v9.99.9-dev \
    --set image.pullPolicy=${IMAGE_PULL_POLICY}

    Check values.yaml for default options.

Build and run locally​

For faster development, you can also build and run Botkube outside K8s cluster.

  1. Build Botkube local binary:

    # Fetch the dependencies
    go mod download
    # Build the binary
    go build -o botkube-agent ./cmd/botkube-agent/

  2. Create a local configuration file to override default values. For example, set communication credentials, specify cluster name, and disable analytics:

    cat <<EOF > local_config.yaml
    communications:
      default-group:
        socketSlack:
          enabled: true
          channels:
            default:
              name: random
          appToken: "xapp-xxxx"
          botToken: "xoxb-xxxx"
    configWatcher:
       enabled: false
    settings:
      clusterName: "labs"
    analytics:
      # -- If true, sending anonymous analytics is disabled. To learn what date we collect,
      # see [Privacy Policy](https://botkube.io/privacy#privacy-policy).
      disable: true
    EOF

    To learn more about configuration, visit https://docs.botkube.io/configuration/.

  3. Export paths to configuration files. The priority will be given to the last (right-most) file specified.

    export BOTKUBE_CONFIG_PATHS="$(pwd)/helm/botkube/values.yaml,$(pwd)/local_config.yaml"

  4. Export the path to Kubeconfig:

    export BOTKUBE_SETTINGS_KUBECONFIG=/Users/$USER/.kube/config # set custom path if necessary

  5. Make sure you are able to access your Kubernetes cluster:

    kubectl cluster-info
    Kubernetes master is running at https://192.168.39.233:8443
    CoreDNS is running at https://192.168.39.233:8443/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns:dns/proxy
    ...

  6. Run Botkube agent binary:

    ./botkube-agent

Develop Botkube plugins​

Prerequisite

  • Being able to start the Botkube binary locally.
  • GoReleaser

Steps

  1. Start fake plugins server to serve binaries from dist folder:

    go run test/helpers/plugin_server.go

    Note If Botkube runs inside the k3d cluster, export the PLUGIN_SERVER_HOST=http://host.k3d.internal environment variable.

  2. Export Botkube plugins cache directory:

    export BOTKUBE_PLUGINS_CACHE__DIR="/tmp/plugins"

  3. In other terminal window, run:

    # rebuild plugins only for current GOOS and GOARCH
    make build-plugins-single &&
    # remove cached plugins
    rm -rf $BOTKUBE_PLUGINS_CACHE__DIR &&
    # start botkube to download fresh plugins
    ./botkube-agent

    Note Each time you make a change to the source or executors plugins re-run the above command.

    Note To build specific plugin binaries, use PLUGIN_TARGETS. For example PLUGIN_TARGETS="x, kubectl" make build-plugins-single.

Making A Change​

  • Before making any significant changes, please open an issue. Discussing your proposed changes ahead of time will make the contribution process smooth for everyone.

  • Once we've discussed your changes, and you've got your code ready, make sure that the build steps mentioned above pass. Open your pull request against the main branch.

    To learn how to do it, follow the Contribute section in the Git workflow guide.

  • To avoid build failures in CI, install golangci-lint and run:

    # From project root directory
    make lint-fix

    This will run the golangci-lint tool to lint the Go code.

Run the e2e tests​

Here are the details you need to set up and run the e2e tests.

Create a Pull Request​

  • Make sure your pull request has good commit messages:

    • Separate subject from body with a blank line
    • Limit the subject line to 50 characters
    • Capitalize the subject line
    • Do not end the subject line with a period
    • Use the imperative mood in the subject line
    • Wrap the body at 72 characters
    • Use the body to explain what and why instead of how

  • Try to squash unimportant commits and rebase your changes on to the main branch, this will make sure we have clean log of changes.

Support Channels​

Join the Botkube-related discussion on Slack!

Create your Slack account on Botkube workspace.

To report bug or feature, use GitHub issues.