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How to Contribute to Botkube

We'd love your help!

Botkube is MIT Licensed and accepts contributions via GitHub pull requests. This document outlines some of the conventions on development workflow, commit message formatting, contact points and other resources to make it easier to get your contributions accepted.

We gratefully welcome improvements to documentation as well as to code.

Contributing to documentation​

You can contribute to documentation by following these instructions

Compile Botkube from source code​

Before you proceed, make sure you have installed Botkube Slack/Mattermost/Teams app and copied the required token as per the steps documented here

Prerequisite​

  • Make sure you have go 1.18 installed.

  • You will also need make and docker installed on your machine.

  • Clone the source code

    git clone https://github.com/kubeshop/botkube.git

Now you can build and run Botkube by one of the following ways

Build and install on Kubernetes​

  1. Build Botkube and create a new container image tagged as ghcr.io/kubeshop/botkube:v9.99.9-dev. Choose one option:

    • Single target build for your local K8s cluster

      This is ideal for running Botkube on a local cluster, e.g. using kind or minikube.

      Remember to set the IMAGE_PLATFORM env var to your target architecture. For example, the command below builds the linux/arm64 target. By default, the build targets linux/amd64.

      IMAGE_PLATFORM=linux/arm64 make container-image-single
      docker tag ghcr.io/kubeshop/botkube:v9.99.9-dev <your_account>/botkube:v9.99.9-dev
      docker push <your_account>/botkube:v9.99.9-dev

      Where <your_account> is Docker hub account to which you can push the image.

    • Multi-arch target builds for any K8s cluster

      This is ideal for running Botkube on remote clusters.

      When tagging your dev image take care to add your target image architecture as a suffix. For example, in the command below we added -amd64 as our target architecture.

      This ensures the image will run correctly on the target K8s cluster.

      Note This command takes some time to run as it builds the images for multiple architectures.

      make container-image
      docker tag ghcr.io/kubeshop/botkube:v9.99.9-dev-amd64 <your_account>/botkube:v9.99.9-dev
      docker push <your_account>/botkube:v9.99.9-dev

      Where <your_account> is Docker hub account to which you can push the image.

  2. Deploy the newly created image in your cluster:

    export IMAGE_REGISTRY="docker.io"
    export IMAGE_REPOSITORY="<your_account>/botkube"
    export SLACK_CHANNEL_NAME="<your_slack_channel_name>"
    export SLACK_API_BOT_TOKEN="<slack_api_bot_token>"

    helm install botkube --namespace botkube --create-namespace \
    --set communications.default-group.slack.enabled=true \
    --set communications.default-group.slack.channels.default.name=${SLACK_CHANNEL_NAME} \
    --set communications.default-group.slack.token=${SLACK_API_BOT_TOKEN} \
    --set settings.clusterName=${CLUSTER_NAME} \
    --set executors.k8s-default-tools.kubectl.enabled=${ALLOW_KUBECTL} \
    --set image.registry=${IMAGE_REGISTRY} \
    --set image.repository=${IMAGE_REPOSITORY} \
    --set image.tag=v9.99.9-dev \
    ./helm/botkube

    Check values.yaml for default options.

Build and run Botkube locally​

For faster development, you can also build and run Botkube outside K8s cluster.

  1. Build Botkube binary if you don't want to build the container image, you can build the binary like this,

    # Fetch the dependencies
    go mod download
    # Build the binary
    go build ./cmd/botkube/
  2. Use templates to create configuration files:

    cp resource_config.yaml.tpl resource_config.yaml
    cp comm_config.yaml.tpl comm_config.yaml

    Edit the newly created resource_config.yaml and comm_config.yaml files to configure resource and set communication credentials.

  3. Export paths for configuration files:

    export BOTKUBE_CONFIG_PATHS="$(pwd)/resource_config.yaml,$(pwd)/comm_config.yaml"
  4. Export the path to Kubeconfig:

    export BOTKUBE_SETTINGS_KUBECONFIG=/Users/$USER/.kube/config # set custom path if necessary
  5. Make sure you are able to access your Kubernetes cluster.

    Run command:

    kubectl cluster-info

    The output should be similar to:

    Kubernetes master is running at https://192.168.39.233:8443
    CoreDNS is running at https://192.168.39.233:8443/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns:dns/proxy
  6. Run Botkube binary

    ./botkube

Making A Change​

  • Before making any significant changes, please open an issue. Discussing your proposed changes ahead of time will make the contribution process smooth for everyone.

  • Once we've discussed your changes and you've got your code ready, make sure that the build steps mentioned above pass. Open your pull request against main branch.

  • To avoid build failures in CI, install golangci-lint v1.46 and run:

    # From project root directory
    make lint

    This will run the golangci-lint tool to lint the Go code.

  • Run e2e tests

  • Make sure your pull request has good commit messages:

    • Separate subject from body with a blank line
    • Limit the subject line to 50 characters
    • Capitalize the subject line
    • Do not end the subject line with a period
    • Use the imperative mood in the subject line
    • Wrap the body at 72 characters
    • Use the body to explain what and why instead of how
  • Try to squash unimportant commits and rebase your changes on to the main branch, this will make sure we have clean log of changes.