Contribute

Get involved with Vitess development

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You want to contribute to Vitess? That’s awesome!

In the past we have reviewed and accepted many external contributions. Examples are the Java JDBC driver, the PHP PDO driver or VTGate v3 improvements.

We’re looking forward to any contribution! Before you start larger contributions, make sure to reach out first and discuss your plans with us.

This page describes for new contributors how to make yourself familiar with Vitess and the programming language Go.

Learning Go

Vitess was one of the early adaptors of Google’s programming language Go. We love it for its simplicity (e.g. compared to C++ or Java) and performance (e.g. compared to Python).

Contributing to our server code will require you to learn Go. We recommend that you follow the Go Tour to get started.

The Go Programming Language Specification is also useful as a reference guide.

Learning Vitess

Before diving into the Vitess codebase, make yourself familiar with the system and run it yourself:

  • Read the What is Vitess page, in particular the architecture section.

  • Read the Concepts and Sharding pages.

    • We also recommend to look at our latest presentations. They contain many illustrations which help understanding how Vitess works in detail.

    • After studying the pages, try to answer the following question (click expand to see the answer):Let’s assume a keyspace with 256 range-based shards: What is the name of the first, the second and the last shard?-01, 01-02, ff-

  • Go through the Kubernetes and local get started guides.

    • While going through the tutorial, look back at the architecture and match the processes you start in Kubernetes with the boxes in the diagram.