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Contributing to Caddy
Welcome! Our community focuses on helping others and making Caddy the best it can be. We gladly accept contributions and encourage you to get involved!
Join us in the forum
The Caddy forum is the place for all discussion that doesn't belong in issues or pull requests. Feel free to participate with us!
If you want to file a bug report or make an improvement to Caddy, however, you should submit an issue or pull request.
Bug reports
Please search this repository with a variety of keywords to ensure your bug is not already reported.
If unique, open an issue and answer the questions so we can understand and reproduce the problematic behavior.
The burden is on you to convince us that it is actually a bug in Caddy. This is easiest to do when you write clear, concise instructions so we can reproduce the behavior (even if it seems obvious). The more detailed and specific you are, the faster we will be able to help you. Check out How to Report Bugs Effectively.
Please be kind. 😄 Remember that Caddy comes at no cost to you, and you're getting free help. If we helped you, please consider donating - it keeps us motivated!
Minor improvements and new tests
Submit pull requests at any time for minor changes or new tests. Make sure to write tests to assert your change is working properly and is thoroughly covered. We'll ask most pull requests to be squashed, especially with small commits.
Your pull request may be thoroughly reviewed. This is because if we accept the PR, we also assume responsibility for it, although we would prefer you to help maintain your code after it gets merged.
Proposals, suggestions, ideas, new features
First, please search with a variety of keywords to ensure your suggestion/proposal is new.
If so, you may open either an issue or a pull request for discussion and feedback.
The advantage of issues is that you don't have to spend time implementing your idea, but you should still describe it thoroughly as if someone reading it would implement the whole thing starting from scratch.
The advantage of pull requests is that we can immediately see the impact the change will have on the project, what the code will look like, and how to improve it. The disadvantage of pull requests is that they are unlikely to get accepted without significant changes first, or it may be rejected entirely. Don't worry, that won't happen without an open discussion first.
If you are going to spend significant time writing code for a new pull request, best to open an issue to "claim" it and get feedback before you invest a lot of time. Not all pull requests are merged, and that's okay. Read why.
Remember: pull requests should always be thoroughly documented both via godoc and with at least a rough draft of documentation that might go on the website for users to read.
Collaborator status
If your pull request is merged, congratulations! You're technically a collaborator. We may also grant you "Collaborator status" which means you can push to the repository and merge other pull requests. We hope that you will stay involved by reviewing pull requests, submitting more of your own, and resolving issues as you are able to. Thanks for making Caddy amazing!
We ask that collaborators will conduct thorough code reviews and be nice to new contributors. Before merging a PR, it's best to get the approval of at least one or two other collaborators and/or the project owner. We prefer squashed commits instead of many little, semantically-unimportant commits. Also, CI and other post-commit hooks must pass before being merged except in certain unusual circumstances.
Collaborator status may be removed for inactive users from time to time as we see fit; this is not an insult, just a basic security precaution in case the account becomes inactive or abandoned. Privileges can always be restored later.
Reviewing pull requests: Please help submit and review pull requests as you are able! We would ask that every pull request be reviewed by at least one collaborator who did not open the pull request before merging. This will help ensure high code quality as new collaborators are added to the project.
Read CodeReviewComments on the Go wiki for an idea of what we look for in good, clean Go code.
Vulnerabilities
If you've found a vulnerability that is serious, please email me: Matthew dot Holt at Gmail. If it's not a big deal, a pull request will probably be faster.
Thank you
Thanks for your help! Caddy would not be what it is today without your contributions.