Contributing

First, thank you for contributing to Meilisearch! The goal of this document is to provide everything you need to start contributing to Milli, the search engine of Meilisearch.

Remember that there are many ways to contribute other than writing code: writing tutorials or blog posts, improving the documentation, submitting bug reports and feature requests...

Assumptions

You're familiar with GitHub and the Pull Requests(PR) workflow.
You've read the Meilisearch documentation.
You know about the Meilisearch community. Please use this for help.

How to Contribute

Ensure your change has an issue! Find an existing issue or open a new issue.
- This is where you can get a feel if the change will be accepted or not.
Once approved, fork the Milli repository in your own GitHub account.
Create a new Git branch
Review the Development Workflow section that describes the steps to maintain the repository.
Make your changes on your branch.
Submit the branch as a Pull Request pointing to the main branch of the Meilisearch repository. A maintainer should comment and/or review your Pull Request within a few days. Although depending on the circumstances, it may take longer.

Development Workflow

We're using a stable version of Rust for the tests and Clippy but the nightly version of Rust for the formatting of the code.

Test

cargo test

Index your documents

It can index a massive amount of documents in not much time, I already achieved to index:

115m songs (song and artist name) in ~48min and take 81GiB on disk.
12m cities (name, timezone and country ID) in ~4min and take 6GiB on disk.

These metrics are done on a MacBook Pro with the M1 processor.

You can feed the engine with your CSV (comma-separated, yes) data like this:

printf "id,name,age\n1,hello,32\n2,kiki,24\n" | http POST 127.0.0.1:9700/documents content-type:text/csv

Don't forget to specify the id of the documents. Also, note that it supports JSON and JSON streaming: you can send them to the engine by using the content-type:application/json and content-type:application/x-ndjson headers respectively.

Format

For your first run you'll need to run this command:

touch benchmarks/benches/datasets_paths.rs

Then you can format your code BUT you need to do it with rust-fmt. If you have not installed the rust nightly version yet here is how to do it:

rustup toolchain install nightly

You can read more about it here: https://rust-lang.github.io/rustup/concepts/channels.html

And finally, to format your code you can run:

cargo +nightly fmt --all

Clippy

cargo clippy

Git Guidelines

Git Branches

All changes must be made in a branch and submitted as PR.

We do not enforce any branch naming style, but please use something descriptive of your changes.

Git Commits

As minimal requirements, your commit message should:

be capitalized
not finish by a dot or any other punctuation character (!,?)
start with a verb so that we can read your commit message this way: "This commit will ...", where "..." is the commit message. e.g.: "Fix the home page button" or "Add more tests for create_index method"

We don't follow any other convention, but if you want to use one, we recommend the Chris Beams one.

GitHub Pull Requests

Some notes on GitHub PRs:

All PRs must be reviewed and approved by at least one maintainer.
The PR title should be accurate and descriptive of the changes. The title of the PR will be indeed automatically added to the next release changelogs.
Convert your PR as a draft if your changes are a work in progress: no one will review it until you pass your PR as ready for review.
The draft PRs are recommended when you want to show that you are working on something and make your work visible.
The branch related to the PR must be up-to-date with main before merging. Fortunately, this project uses Bors to automatically enforce this requirement without the PR author having to rebase manually.

Release Process (for internal team only)

Meilisearch tools follow the Semantic Versioning Convention.

Automation to rebase and Merge the PRs

This project integrates a bot that helps us manage pull requests merging.
Read more about this.

Automated changelogs

This project integrates a tool to create automated changelogs: the release-drafter.

How to Publish the Release

Make a PR modifying all the Cargo.toml files with the right version by using our automation -> Go to this GitHub Action, click on Run workflow, and fill the appropriate version before validating. A PR updating all the versions in the Cargo.toml files will be created.

Once the changes are merged on main, you can publish the current draft release via the GitHub interface: on this page, click on Edit (related to the draft release) > update the description if needed > when you are ready, click on Publish release.

Thank you again for reading this through, we can not wait to begin to work with you if you made your way through this contributing guide ❤️

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