Contributing to opentelemetry-dotnet-contrib

The OpenTelemetry .NET special interest group (SIG) meets regularly. See the OpenTelemetry community repo for information on this and other language SIGs.

See the public meeting notes for a summary description of past meetings. To request edit access, join the meeting or get in touch on Slack.

Anyone may contribute but there are benefits of being a member of our community. See the community membership document on how to become a Member, Approver and Maintainer.

Find a buddy and get started quickly

If you are looking for someone to help you find a starting point and be a resource for your first contribution, join our Slack channel and find a buddy!

Create your CNCF Slack account and join the otel-dotnet channel.
Post in the room with an introduction to yourself, what area you are interested in (check issues marked with help wanted), and say you are looking for a buddy. We will match you with someone who has experience in that area.

Your OpenTelemetry buddy is your resource to talk to directly on all aspects of contributing to OpenTelemetry: providing context, reviewing PRs, and helping those get merged. Buddies will not be available 24/7, but are committed to responding during their normal working hours.

Development Environment

You can contribute to this project from a Windows, macOS, or Linux machine.

On all platforms, the minimum requirements are:

Git client and command line tools
.NET SDK (latest stable version)

Please note that individual project requirements may vary.

Linux or MacOS

Visual Studio for Mac or Visual Studio Code

Mono might be required by your IDE but is not required by this project. This is because unit tests targeting .NET Framework (net452, net46, net461 etc.) are disabled outside of Windows.

Windows

Visual Studio 2022+ or Visual Studio Code
.NET Framework 4.6.2+

Public API validation

It is critical to NOT make breaking changes to public APIs which have been released in stable builds. We also strive to keep a minimal public API surface. This repository is using Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.PublicApiAnalyzers and Package validation to validate public APIs.

For details about working with these packages and updating "public API files" when new APIs are added see: OpenTelemetry .NET > Contributing to opentelemetry-dotnet > Public API validation.

Pull Requests

How to create pull requests

Everyone is welcome to contribute code to opentelemetry-dotnet-contrib via GitHub pull requests (PRs).

To create a new PR, fork the project in GitHub and clone the upstream repo:

git clone https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet-contrib.git

Navigate to the repo root:

cd opentelemetry-dotnet-contrib

Add your fork as an origin:

git remote add fork https://github.com/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/opentelemetry-dotnet-contrib.git

Run build:

dotnet build

Run tests:

dotnet test --no-build

If you made changes to the Markdown documents (*.md files), install the latest markdownlint-cli and run:

markdownlint .

If you made changes to any YAML files (*.yaml or *.yml files), install the latest yamllint and run:

yamllint --no-warnings .

Check out a new branch, make modifications and push the branch to your fork:

$ git checkout -b feature
# edit files
$ git commit
$ git push fork feature

Open a pull request against the main opentelemetry-dotnet-contrib repo.

Tips and best practices for pull requests

If the PR is not ready for review, please mark it as draft.
Make sure CLA is signed and all required CI checks are clear.
Submit small, focused PRs addressing a single concern/issue.
Make sure the PR title reflects the contribution.
Write a summary that helps understand the change.
Include usage examples in the summary, where applicable.
Include benchmarks (before/after) in the summary, for contributions that are performance enhancements.

How to get pull requests merged

A PR is considered to be ready to merge when:

It has received an approval either from one of the Approvers / Maintainers or the respective component owner.
Major feedback/comments are resolved.
It has been open for review for at least one working day. This gives people reasonable time to review.
- Trivial change (typo, cosmetic, doc, etc.) doesn't have to wait for one day.
- Urgent fix can take exception as long as it has been actively communicated.

Any maintainer can merge PRs once they are ready to merge however maintainers might decide to wait on merging changes until there are more approvals and/or discussion, or based on other factors such as release timing and risk to users. For example if a stable release is planned and a new change is introduced adding public API(s) or behavioral changes it might be held until the next alpha/beta release.

Release process

For details about the release process and information about how to request a release for a component in this repository see: Requesting a release.

Style guide

This project includes a .editorconfig file which is supported by all the IDEs/editors mentioned above. It works with the IDE/editor only and does not affect the actual build of the project.

This repository also includes stylecop ruleset files. These files are used to configure the StyleCop.Analyzers which runs during build. Breaking the rules will result in a build failure.

New projects

This repo is a great place to contribute exporters, instrumentation libraries, resource detectors, samplers, or any other kind of extension/component not explicitly defined in the OpenTelemetry Specification. Please refer to this page for help writing your component.

When contributing a new project you are expected to assign either yourself or someone else who would take ownership of the component you are contributing. The owner should at least be an OpenTelemetry Member to be eligible to assigned as component owner. This is required to ensure that reviews can be automatically requested from the owners. Once the owner is identified, please update component_owners file for the new project. The component owner(s) are expected to respond to issues and review PRs affecting their component.

Although the projects within this repo share some properties and configurations, they are built and released independently. So if you are creating a new project within /src and corresponding test project within /test, here are a few things you should do to ensure that your project is automatically built and shipped through CI.

Note

It is generally helpful to reference a previous pull request when adding a new project to the repository. A good example to follow is the pull request which added the OpenTelemetry.OpAmp.Client project: #2917.

Based on what your project is, you may need to depend on the OpenTelemetry SDK or the OpenTelemetry API Include the necessary package in your project. You can choose the version that you want to depend on. Usually, it is a good idea to use the latest stable version. For example:
```
<ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="OpenTelemetry" Version="$(OpenTelemetryCoreLatestVersion)" />
</ItemGroup>
```

If your component relies on new features not yet part of the stable release, you can refer to the latest pre-release version.

<ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="OpenTelemetry" Version="$(OpenTelemetryCoreLatestPrereleaseVersion)" />
</ItemGroup>

The assembly and nuget versioning is managed through MinVer for all the projects in the repo. MinVer will assign the version to your project based on the tag prefix specified by you. To ensure your project is versioned appropriately, specify a <MinVerTagPrefix> property in your project file. If your project is named as "OpenTelemetry.Instrumentation.FooBar", the MinVerTagPrefix must be "Instrumentation.FooBar-". Example:
```
<PropertyGroup>
    <MinVerTagPrefix>Instrumentation.FooBar-</MinVerTagPrefix>
</PropertyGroup>
```
The public API surface of all packages is analyzed by Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.PublicApiAnalyzers. This analyzer requires a specific file structure to store the information about public API. See this doc for help setting up public API analysis.
Update the CI workflow so that it builds your new project and update the code coverage definition for your new component (it should match what you define in the CI workflow).
Add your component name to the issue templates in your PR. The maintainer will help to create a new "comp:" label once the PR is merged.

Add a README.md file for your project describing how to install and use your package. Every project's README file needs to have a link to the Nuget package. You can use the below snippet for reference:

[![NuGet version badge](https://img.shields.io/nuget/v/{your_package_name})](https://www.nuget.org/packages/{your_package_name})
[![NuGet download count badge](https://img.shields.io/nuget/dt/{your_package_name})](https://www.nuget.org/packages/{your_package_name})

Add a CHANGELOG.md file for your project to track changes made after the initial pull request.

Guidance for components on supporting target frameworks

SHOULD support the .NET versions which are supported by the OpenTelemetry main repo packages.
MUST document the target frameworks supported in the main README.md file.
MUST NOT support out-of-support .NET runtimes (e.g.: .NET Framework 4.5.2, .NET Core 2.1 etc). CI checks in this repository will not be run against out of support versions.
Whenever a .NET version reaches end of support, components MUST drop support for it as well. Note: This change does not require major version bump. For reference see this.

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