Contributing to Beats

The Beats platform is an open source project and we love to receive contributions from our community — you!

There are many ways to contribute, from writing tutorials or blog posts, improving the documentation, submitting bug reports and feature requests or writing code for implementing a whole new Beat!

Please start by opening a topic on the forums. It may be that somebody is already working on it, or that there are particular issues that you should know about before implementing the change.

We enjoy working with contributors to get their code accepted. There are many approaches to fixing a problem and it is important to find the best approach before writing too much code. In particular, we are very likely to reject pull requests that add a new output type (libbeat output for kafka, riemann, etc.). The reason is that maintaining all these outputs would involve a significant effort which is already spent in Logstash. You can use Logstash as a gateway to lots of already supported systems.

The process for contributing to any of the Elastic projects is similar.

Contribution Steps for libbeat code

Test your changes! Run the test suite (make test)
Please make sure you have signed our Contributor License Agreement. We are not asking you to assign copyright to us, but to give us the right to distribute your code without restriction. We ask this of all contributors in order to assure our users of the origin and continuing existence of the code. You only need to sign the CLA once.
Send a pull request! Push your changes to your fork of the repository and submit a pull request. In the pull request, describe what your changes do and mention any bugs/issues related to the pull request.

Writing a new Beat

Start in a new repository and use libbeat packages as you would use any other Go library. Have a look at the way Packetbeat makes use of these packages for an example.

Coding Standards

We try to follow the Golang coding standards as close as possible. Make sure to run gofmt before you push your code.

Dependency Management

Beats are using godep for dependency management. This means all dependencies are part of the repository. For updating dependencies we have the following strategy:

If possible use the most recent release
If no release tag exist, try to stay as close as possible to master

Update Dependencies

Godep allows to update all dependencies at once. We DON'T do that. If a dependency is updated, the newest dependency must be loaded into the $GOPATH through either using

go get your-go-package-path

or by having the package already in the $GOPATHwith the correct version / tag. To then save the most recent packages into Godep, run

godep update your-go-package-path

Avoid using godep save ./... or godep update ... as this will update all packages at once and in case of issues it will be hard to track which one cause the issue.

After you updated the package, open a pull request where you state which package you updated.

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