Pull Requests and Changes

Change Process

Once you’ve implemented a bug fix or feature, it’s time to submit a pull request to Spinnaker. We recommend small, well-tested pull requests as a starting point for new technical contributors. For information on the correct fork-and-PR GitHub workflows to follow when contributing, reference the local clone guide.

To work on bigger technical changes, follow the feature proposal or RFC processes.

Pull Request Tips

  • Check that your title describes your changes and adheres to our message conventions .
  • Add inline code comments to changes that might not be obvious.
  • Squash your commits into logically reviewable chunks when you first submit your PR. Address feedback in follow-up (unsquashed) commits. It’s much easier to review incremental changes to feedback when the commits are kept separate.
  • All pull requests should get reviewed by at least one other member of the Spinnaker organization before merging. (While some members of the organization have access to merge without a review, this should only be done in an emergency or when merging a large series of dependency bumps across repositories.)
  • Squash your commits when merging to the branch.

Commit and PR message conventions

Please follow conventions below in your git commit messages. Since GitHub auto-fills Pull Request titles from the first commit message of the PR, following these conventions should help to title your PRs according to our community standards.

Note: In order to track and summarize the changes happening in Spinnaker, we use a changelog automation tool called clog which scrapes information from commit messages, which follow the ‘conventional’ format.

To summarize, messages should be formatted as follows:

  1. <type>(<scope>): <subject>
  2. <empty line>
  3. <body>
  4. <empty line>
  5. <footer>

Type

TypePurpose
featA new feature. Please also link to the issue (in the body) if applicable. Causes a minor version bump.
fixA bug fix. Please also link to the issue (in the body) if applicable.
docsA documentation change.
styleA code change that does not affect the meaning of the code, (e.g. indentation).
refactorA code change that neither fixes a bug or add a feature.
perfA code change that improves performance.
testAdding missing tests.
choreChanges to build process or auxiliary tools or libraries such as documentation generation.
configChanges to configurations that have tangible effects on users, (e.g. renaming properties, changing defaults, etc).

The type of keyword affects the next semantic version bump. The feat keyword causes a minor version bump, while the rest of the keywords cause a patch version bump. Major version bumps are triggered by the presence of the words BREAKING CHANGE in the commit message body. This is covered more in Body .

If you don’t use one of the previous types (or don’t follow the convention), your commit will not be included in the generated changelog. Your change will still affect the next semantic version bump, but it will be considered a patch change, not a major or minor change (even if the change is a breaking change or a feature).

If you submit a pull request with multiple commits and choose to Squash and Merge the pull request, the individual commit message are not added to the changelog, only the pull request message is. To include each commit in your pull request in the changelog and next version calculation, merge the changes without squashing.

Scope

The scope of the commit message indicates the area or feature of Spinnaker the commit applies to. For instance, if you were to submit a patch to the Google provider in Clouddriver, your commit message might look something like:

  1. feat(provider/google): Updated forwarding rule schema.

or if you submit a fix pertaining to authentication in Gate:

  1. fix(authN): Fixed session authentication coherence.

The scope is purposefully left open-ended, but try to group similar changes using the same value. Changes that have the same scope will be grouped together during changelog generation:

Features

  • Some_scope
    • First feature goes here.
    • Second feature goes here.

Subject

The subject should be a short summary of the patch.

Body

The body should include any detailed information about the patch; however, these can also go in the pull request body.

Any information about breaking changes should be present in the footer. To signify a breaking change, add one line at the end of the commit message with ‘BREAKING CHANGE’ in the line:

  1. feat(provider/google): Added a very important and breaking feature.
  3. BREAKING CHANGE: More detail here if necessary.

At minimum, ‘BREAKING CHANGE’ must be specified on the last line. The extra detail is not mandatory.

Feature Proposals

The Spinnaker community has historically avoided accepting pull requests that add features without prior discussion. If you would like to propose a feature:

  • Open an issue describing the desired functionality.
  • Share your issue link in the #dev channel in Slack.
  • Consider discussing your ideas with other contributors before implementing them, to avoid rework.

Requests For Change

If your change is large or very impactful, we may encourage you to submit an RFC:

Last modified July 13, 2021: docs(site): add 404.html and fix docs contrib section (#117) (df60766)