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Contributing to Rerun

This is written for anyone who wants to contribute to the Rerun repository.

See also

What to contribute

You can also look at our good first issue tag.

Pull requests

We use Trunk Based Development, which means we encourage small, short-lived branches. Open draft PR:s to get some early feedback on your work.

All PR:s are merged with Squash and Merge, meaning they all get squashed to just one commit on the main branch. This means you don't need to keep a clean commit history on your feature branches. In fact, it is preferable to add new commits to a branch rather than rebasing or squashing. For one, it makes it easier to track progress on a branch, but rebasing and force-pushing also discourages collaboration on a branch.

Our CI will record various binary sizes and run some benchmarks on each merged PR.

Pull requests from external contributors require approval for CI runs. This can be done manually, by clicking the Approve and run button:

Image showing the approve and run button

Members of the rerun-io organization and collaborators in the rerun-io/rerun repository may enable auto-approval of workflow runs for a single PR by commenting with @rerun-bot approve:

PR comment with the text @rerun-bot approve

Contributing to CI

Every CI job would in its ideal state consist of only two steps:

  1. Install tools and libraries1
  2. Run a script

In which the script is written and tested locally before being wrapped in a CI workflow file. This does not mean that scripts are merely reproducible locally (though that is also true), it means that they must be written with a local-first mindset, as if they are not supposed to run on CI at all.

This approach has a number of benefits:

  • Instead of Bash embedded in YAML, scripts may be written in an Actual Programming Language™
  • Significantly lower iteration times when working on CI
  • Ability to perform a job manually in case the CI fails

Additionally, always output any artifacts produced by CI to GCS instead of the GHA artifact storage. This can be a serious lifesaver when something breaks, as it allows anyone to download the output of a script and continue from where it failed, instead of being forced to start over from scratch.

Here are some guidelines to follow when writing such scripts:

Local-first means easy for contributors to run.

The following should be documented in each script:

  • Dependencies
  • Files and directories
  • Environment variables
  • Usage examples

Inputs should be passed in explicitly via arguments, and use sane defaults. If an input has a default value, it should be documented in its description.

Every input should be checked as early as possible. This includes:

  • Checking if authentication credentials are valid
  • Validating inputs and parsing into more specific types where possible:
    • Numeric ranges
    • String character sets/encodings
    • Length limits
    • Date formats
    • etc.
  • Checking that input file paths are valid and the files they point to exist

Input and output file paths should also accept GCS paths (gs://bucket/blob/path) and stdin/stdout (-), if it makes sense.

Be extra descriptive in error messages, it may be the only piece of information someone debugging a CI failure has available to figure out what went wrong. Print frequently to hint at what is going on and display progress to the user.

Environment variables should only be used for authentication with external services and configuring output (e.g. disabling color). Many SDKs support some form of persistent/default authentication, and scripts should take advantage of this where possible. For example, GCP has Application Default Credentials.

If the script performs destructive or otherwise irreversible actions, then it should support a --dry-run option if possible.

Adding dependencies

Be thoughtful when adding dependencies. Each new dependency is a liability which lead to increased compile times, a bigger binary, more code that can break, a larger attack surface, etc. Sometimes it is better to write a hundred lines of code than to add a new dependency.

Whenever you add a new dependency in a PR, make sure you motivate it:

  • Why use the dependency instead of rolling our own?
  • Why this dependency instead of another?

For Rust, make sure you use default-features = false if it makes sense, to minimize the amount of new code that is pulled in.

When reviewing a PR, always check the diff of Cargo.lock (it is collapsed by default in GitHub 😤).

For a guide on picking good dependencies, see https://gist.github.com/repi/d98bf9c202ec567fd67ef9e31152f43f.

Any full cargo update should be its own stand-alone PR. Make sure you include the output of it in the commit message.

Structure

The main crates are found in the crates/ folder, with examples in the examples/ folder.

To get an overview of the crates, read their documentation with:

cargo doc --no-deps --open

To learn about the viewer, run:

cargo run -p rerun -- --help

Tools

We use the pixi for managing dev-tool versioning, download and task running. To see available tasks, use pixi task list. TODO(andreas): This doesn't list tasks from all Pixi environments. There's no way to this so far, see also here.

We use cargo deny to check our dependency tree for copy-left licenses, duplicate dependencies and rustsec advisories. You can configure it in deny.toml. Usage: cargo deny check Configure your editor to run cargo fmt on save. Also configure it to strip trailing whitespace, and to end each file with a newline. Settings for VSCode can be found in the .vscode folder and should be applied automatically. If you are using another editor, consider adding good setting to this repository!

Depending on the changes you made run cargo test --all-targets --all-features, pixi run py-test and pixi run -e cpp cpp-test locally.

Linting

Prior to pushing changes to a PR, at a minimum, you should always run pixi run fast-lint. This is designed to run in a few seconds and should catch the more trivial issues to avoid wasting CI time.

Hooks

We recommend adding the Rerun pre-push hook to your local checkout, which among other-things will run pixi run fast-lint for you.

To install the hooks, simply copy them into the .git/hooks directory of your local checkout.

cp hooks/pre-push .git/hooks/pre-push
chmod +x .git/hooks/pre-push

or if you prefer you can configure git to use this directory as the hooks directory:

git config core.hooksPath hooks

Optional

You can use bacon to automatically check your code on each save. For instance, running just bacon will re-run cargo clippy each time you change a Rust file. See bacon.toml for more.

You can set up sccache to speed up re-compilation (e.g. when switching branches). You can control the size of the cache with export SCCACHE_CACHE_SIZE="256G".

Other

You can view higher log levels with export RUST_LOG=debug or export RUST_LOG=trace.

Footnotes

  1. For some larger jobs, we prefer to use a docker image to make managing dependencies simpler, and to keep everything locked to a specific version as much as possible. In this case, it's still good practice to install dependencies, because it ensures the job continues to work even if the docker image is out of date. ↩