Thank you for using RabbitMQ and for taking the time to contribute to the project. This document has two main parts:

when and how to file GitHub issues for RabbitMQ projects
how to submit pull requests

They intend to save you and RabbitMQ maintainers some time, so please take a moment to read through them.

Overview

GitHub issues

The RabbitMQ team uses GitHub issues for specific actionable items that engineers can work on. This assumes the following:

GitHub issues are not used for questions, investigations, root cause analysis, discussions of potential issues, etc (as defined by this team)
Enough information is provided by the reporter for maintainers to work with

The team receives many questions through various venues every single day. Frequently, these questions do not include the necessary details the team needs to begin useful work. GitHub issues can very quickly turn into a something impossible to navigate and make sense of. Because of this, questions, investigations, root cause analysis, and discussions of potential features are all considered to be mailing list material. If you are unsure where to begin, the RabbitMQ users mailing list is the right place.

Getting all the details necessary to reproduce an issue, make a conclusion or even form a hypothesis about what's happening can take a fair amount of time. Please help others help you by providing a way to reproduce the behavior you're observing, or at least sharing as much relevant information as possible on the RabbitMQ users mailing list.

Please provide versions of the software used:

RabbitMQ server
Erlang
Operating system version (and distribution, if applicable)
All client libraries used
RabbitMQ plugins (if applicable)

The following information greatly helps in investigating and reproducing issues:

RabbitMQ server logs
A code example or terminal transcript that can be used to reproduce
Full exception stack traces (a single line message is not enough!)
rabbitmqctl report and rabbitmqctl environment output
Other relevant details about the environment and workload, e.g. a traffic capture
Feel free to edit out hostnames and other potentially sensitive information.

To make collecting much of this and other environment information, use the rabbitmq-collect-env script. It will produce an archive with server logs, operating system logs, output of certain diagnostics commands and so on. Please note that no effort is made to scrub any information that may be sensitive.

Pull Requests

RabbitMQ projects use pull requests to discuss, collaborate on and accept code contributions. Pull requests is the primary place of discussing code changes.

Here's the recommended workflow:

Fork the repository or repositories you plan on contributing to. If multiple repositories are involved in addressing the same issue, please use the same branch name in each repository
Create a branch with a descriptive name in the relevant repositories
Make your changes, run tests (usually with make tests), commit with a descriptive message, push to your fork
Submit pull requests with an explanation what has been changed and why
Submit a filled out and signed Contributor Agreement if needed (see below)
Be patient. We will get to your pull request eventually

If what you are going to work on is a substantial change, please first ask the core team for their opinion on the RabbitMQ users mailing list.

Code of Conduct

See CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.

Contributor Agreement

If you want to contribute a non-trivial change, please submit a signed copy of our Contributor Agreement around the time you submit your pull request. This will make it much easier (in some cases, possible) for the RabbitMQ team at Pivotal to merge your contribution.

Where to Ask Questions

If something isn't clear, feel free to ask on our mailing list.