start-os/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Embassy OS

First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute! ❤️

All types of contributions are encouraged and valued. See the Table of Contents for different ways to help and details about how this project handles them. Please make sure to read the relevant section before making your contribution. It will make it a lot easier for us maintainers and smooth out the experience for all involved. The community looks forward to your contributions. 🎉

And if you like the project, but just don't have time to contribute, that's fine. There are other easy ways to support the project and show your appreciation, which we would also be very happy about:

• Star the project
• Tweet about it
• Refer this project in your project's readme
• Mention the project at local meetups and tell your friends/colleagues
• Buy an Embassy

Table of Contents

• I Have a Question
• I Want To Contribute
  • Reporting Bugs
  • Suggesting Enhancements
  • Your First Code Contribution
    • Setting Up Your Development Environment
    • Building The Image
  • Improving The Documentation
• Styleguides
  • Formatting
  • Atomic Commits
  • Commit Messages
  • Pull Requests
  • Rebasing Changes
• Join The Discussion
• Join The Project Team

I Have a Question

If you want to ask a question, we assume that you have read the available Documentation.

Before you ask a question, it is best to search for existing Issues that might help you. In case you have found a suitable issue and still need clarification, you can write your question in this issue. It is also advisable to search the internet for answers first.

If you then still feel the need to ask a question and need clarification, we recommend the following:

• Open an Issue.
• Provide as much context as you can about what you're running into.
• Provide project and platform versions, depending on what seems relevant.

We will then take care of the issue as soon as possible.

I Want To Contribute

Legal Notice

When contributing to this project, you must agree that you have authored 100% of the content, that you have the necessary rights to the content and that the content you contribute may be provided under the project license.

Reporting Bugs

Before Submitting a Bug Report

A good bug report shouldn't leave others needing to chase you up for more information. Therefore, we ask you to investigate carefully, collect information and describe the issue in detail in your report. Please complete the following steps in advance to help us fix any potential bug as fast as possible.

• Make sure that you are using the latest version.
• Determine if your bug is really a bug and not an error on your side e.g. using incompatible environment components/versions (Make sure that you have read the documentation. If you are looking for support, you might want to check this section).
• To see if other users have experienced (and potentially already solved) the same issue you are having, check if there is not already a bug report existing for your bug or error in the bug tracker.
• Also make sure to search the internet (including Stack Overflow) to see if users outside of the GitHub community have discussed the issue.
• Collect information about the bug:
  • Stack trace (Traceback)
  • Client OS, Platform and Version (Windows/Linux/macOS/iOS/Android, Firefox/Tor Browser/Consulate)
  • Version of the interpreter, compiler, SDK, runtime environment, package manager, depending on what seems relevant.
  • Possibly your input and the output
  • Can you reliably reproduce the issue? And can you also reproduce it with older versions?

How Do I Submit a Good Bug Report?

You must never report security related issues, vulnerabilities or bugs to the issue tracker, or elsewhere in public. Instead sensitive bugs must be sent by email to security@start9labs.com.

We use GitHub issues to track bugs and errors. If you run into an issue with the project:

• Open an Issue. (Since we can't be sure at this point whether it is a bug or not, we ask you not to talk about a bug yet and not to label the issue.)
• Explain the behavior you would expect and the actual behavior.
• Please provide as much context as possible and describe the reproduction steps that someone else can follow to recreate the issue on their own. This usually includes your code. For good bug reports you should isolate the problem and create a reduced test case.
• Provide the information you collected in the previous section.

Once it's filed:

• The project team will label the issue accordingly.
• A team member will try to reproduce the issue with your provided steps. If there are no reproduction steps or no obvious way to reproduce the issue, the team will ask you for those steps and mark the issue as needs-repro. Bugs with the needs-repro tag will not be addressed until they are reproduced.
• If the team is able to reproduce the issue, it will be marked needs-fix, as well as possibly other tags (such as critical), and the issue will be left to be implemented by someone.

Suggesting Enhancements

This section guides you through submitting an enhancement suggestion for Embassy OS, including completely new features and minor improvements to existing functionality. Following these guidelines will help maintainers and the community to understand your suggestion and find related suggestions.

Before Submitting an Enhancement

• Make sure that you are using the latest version.
• Read the documentation carefully and find out if the functionality is already covered, maybe by an individual configuration.
• Perform a search to see if the enhancement has already been suggested. If it has, add a comment to the existing issue instead of opening a new one.
• Find out whether your idea fits with the scope and aims of the project. It's up to you to make a strong case to convince the project's developers of the merits of this feature. Keep in mind that we want features that will be useful to the majority of our users and not just a small subset. If you're just targeting a minority of users, consider writing an add-on/plugin library.

How Do I Submit a Good Enhancement Suggestion?

Enhancement suggestions are tracked as GitHub issues.

• Use a clear and descriptive title for the issue to identify the suggestion.
• Provide a step-by-step description of the suggested enhancement in as many details as possible.
• Describe the current behavior and explain which behavior you expected to see instead and why. At this point you can also tell which alternatives do not work for you.
• You may want to include screenshots and animated GIFs which help you demonstrate the steps or point out the part which the suggestion is related to. You can use this tool to record GIFs on macOS and Windows, and this tool or this tool on Linux.
• Explain why this enhancement would be useful to most Embassy OS users. You may also want to point out the other projects that solved it better and which could serve as inspiration.

Project Structure

Embassy OS has 3 main components: agent, appmgr, and ui.

• The ui (Typescript Ionic Angular) is the code that is deployed to the browser to provide the user interface for Embassy OS
• The agent (Haskell) is a daemon that provides the interface for the ui to interact with the Embassy, as well as manage system state.
• appmgr (Rust) is a command line utility and (soon to be) daemon that sets up and manages services and their environments.

Your First Code Contribution

Setting up your development environment

agent

There are two main workflows to consider when developing on the agent. During the development process you will spend most of your time developing in an environment where you cannot actually run the agent. This is because we make heavy platform specific assumptions (by nature of the project) around what folders get used and what package management tools are used for the underlying system. If you are running this on a platform besides Linux you won't even be able to run the agent effectively on your dev machine. Even if you are on Linux you may not want to turn administrative control over to the software you are currently developing. So how do you know that anything you are doing is right? We make extensive use of Haskell's type system and surrounding tooling. For this you will want to make sure you are using the haskell-language-server and stack

At some point though you will want to build the agent for the target platform (Raspberry Pi 4). This is the second build flow that you will need to consider.

At Start9 we build the agent in two different ways. The primary way we have done it is on the Raspberry Pi itself. To do this you will need stack built for the Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately, however, FPComplete no longer distributes ARMv7 binaries for stack. Though hopefully soon we will be able to submit the binaries we've built for this project back to them and have them hosted more visibly. The way we bootstrap through this problem is by downloading version 2.1.3 and using that to compile v2.5.1. Before you can successfully compile anything with GHC on the Raspberry Pi. You will need to tweak the relevant GHC config. You will need to edit the file at ~/.stack/programs/arm-linux/ghc-8.10.2/lib/ghc-8.10.2/settings and change the line ("C compiler flags", " -marm -fno-stack-protector -mcpu=cortex-a7") to include -mcpu=cortex-a7. You will also need to make sure you've downloaded and installed LLVM 9.

Once you have done these things, you simply need to cd into the embassy-os project and then run make agent.

ui

• Requirements
  • Install nodejs
  • Install npm
  • Install ionic cli
• Scripts (run within ./ui directory)
  • npm i installs ui node package dependencies
  • npm run build compiles project, depositing build artifacts into ./ui/www
  • npm run build-prod as above but customized for deployment to an Embassy
  • ionic serve serves the ui on localhost:8100 for local development. Edit ./ui/use-mocks.json to 'true' to use mocks during local development
  • ./build-send.sh <embassy .local address suffix> builds the project and deploys it to the referenced Embassy
    • Find your Embassy on the LAN using the Start9 Setup App or network tools. It's address will be of the form start9-<suffix>.local.
    • For example ./build-send.sh abcdefgh will deploy the ui to the Embassy with LAN address start9-abcdefgh.local.
    • SSH keys must be installed on the Embassy prior to running this script.

appmgr

• Install Rust
• Recommended: rust-analyzer

Building The Image

• Requirements
  • ext4fs (available if running on the Linux kernel)
  • Docker
  • GNU Make
• Building
  • build the agent
    • make sure resulting artifact is agent/dist/agent
  • run make

Improving The Documentation

You can find the repository for Start9's documentation here. If there is something you would like to see added, let us know, or create an issue yourself. Welcome are contributions for lacking or incorrect information, broken links, requested additions, or general style improvements.

Contributions in the form of setup guides for integrations with external applications are highly encouraged. If you struggled through a process and would like to share your steps with others, check out the docs for each service we support. The wrapper repos contain sections for adding integration guides, such as this one. These not only help out others in the community, but inform how we can create a more seamless and intuitive experience.

Styleguides

Formatting

Code must be formatted with the formatter designated for each component:

• ui: tslint
• agent: brittany
• appmgr: rustfmt

Atomic Commits

Commits should be atomic and diffs should be easy to read. Do not mix any formatting fixes or code moves with actual code changes.

Commit Messages

If a commit touches only 1 component, prefix the message with the affected component. i.e. appmgr: update to tokio v0.3.

Pull Requests

The body of a pull request should contain sufficient description of what the changes do, as well as a justification. You should include references to any relevant issues.

Rebasing Changes

When a pull request conflicts with the target branch, you may be asked to rebase it on top of the current target branch. The git rebase command will take care of rebuilding your commits on top of the new base.

This project aims to have a clean git history, where code changes are only made in non-merge commits. This simplifies auditability because merge commits can be assumed to not contain arbitrary code changes.

Join The Discussion

Current or aspiring contributors? Join our community developer Matrix channel.

Just interested in or using the project? Join our community Telegram or Matrix.

Join The Project Team

Interested in becoming a part of the Start9 Labs team? Send an email to jobs@start9labs.com

Attribution

This guide is based on the contributing-gen. Make your own!