# Contributing

Thanks for your interest in contributing! This document contains `nats-io/nats-server` specific contributing details. If you are a first-time contributor, please refer to the general [NATS Contributor Guide](https://nats.io/contributing/) to get a comprehensive overview of contributing to the NATS project.

## Getting started

There are three general ways you can contribute to this repo:

- Proposing an enhancement or new feature
- Reporting a bug or regression
- Contributing changes to the source code

For the first two, refer to the [GitHub Issues](https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server/issues/new/choose) which guides you through the available options along with the needed information to collect.

## Contributing changes

_Prior to opening a pull request, it is recommended to open an issue first to ensure the maintainers can review intended changes. This saves time for both you and us. Exceptions to this rule include fixing non-functional source such as code comments, documentation or other supporting files._

Proposing source code changes is done through GitHub's standard pull request workflow.

If your branch is a work-in-progress then please start by creating your pull requests as draft, by clicking the down-arrow next to the `Create pull request` button and instead selecting `Create draft pull request`.

This will defer the automatic process of requesting a review from the NATS team and significantly reduces noise until you are ready. Once you are happy, you can click the `Ready for review` button.

### Guidelines

A good pull request includes:

- A succinct yet descriptive title describing, in a few words, what is fixed/improved/optimised by this change.
- A high-level description of the changes, including an overview of _why_ the changes are relevant or what problem you are trying to solve. Include links to any issues that are related by adding comments like `Resolves #NNN` to your description. See [Linking a Pull Request to an Issue](https://docs.github.com/en/issues/tracking-your-work-with-issues/linking-a-pull-request-to-an-issue) for more information.
- An up-to-date parent commit. Please make sure you are pulling in the latest `main` branch and rebasing your work on top of it, i.e. `git rebase main`.
- Unit tests where appropriate. Bug fixes will benefit from the addition of regression tests and performance improvements will benefit from the addition of new benchmarks where possible. New features will **NOT** be accepted without suitable test coverage!
- No more commits than necessary. Sometimes having multiple commits is useful for telling a story or isolating changes from one another, but please squash down any unnecessary commits that may just be for clean-up, comments or small changes.
- No additional external dependencies that aren't absolutely essential. Please do everything you can to avoid pulling in additional libraries/dependencies into `go.mod` as we will be very critical of these.

### Sign-off

In order to accept a contribution, you will first need to certify that the contribution is your original work and that you license the work to the project under the [Apache-2.0 license](https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server/blob/main/LICENSE).

This is done by using `Signed-off-by: Your Name <your.email@example.com>` statement which should appear in all of your commit messages. Please note that we can only accept sign-offs under a legal name. Nicknames and aliases are not permitted.

To perform a sign-off when committing with `git`, use `git commit -s` (or `--signoff`) to add the `Signed-off-by:` trailer to your commit message.

## Get help

If you have questions about the contribution process, please start a [GitHub discussion](https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server/discussions), join the [NATS Slack](https://slack.nats.io/), or send your question to the [NATS Google Group](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/natsio).
