Thank you for considering to contribute to Rex! It is a free and open source project developed by volunteers like you from all around the world.
We would like to make sure everyone can make an efficient use of their time. The goal of the guidelines here is to help communication around contributions.
Since most contributions we receive is about code, this guide also focuses a lot on them. But it's far from being the only way you can participate:
- improving documentation
- testing with various setups
- submitting and triaging bug reports
- spreading the word via blogs, talks and social media
- starring the project on GitHub
- adding it to your favorites on MetaCPAN
- listing it as part of your stack on StackShare
All those are equally encouraged and welcome!
Over the course of years, many decisions were taken around Rex. We found some of the ideas coming up more often than others, so we collected them here (in no particular order).
If you need help with questions like “How do I…?” and “Why does it…?”, please see our support page for both community and commercial support.
Please use the issue tracker only for bug reports and feature requests.
The first step of any change proposal is to open an issue about it. This gives a chance to discuss the details, and to design potential solutions before spending any effort on the implementation.
To cover the vast majority of typical discussion points in advance, there are predefined templates for issues and pull requests. Please make sure to use them in order to streamline the workflow.
If something comes up that is not a good fit for the templates, that's probably already an early indicator that it should be discussed more closely. In this case please contact us first, or at least provide a reasoning about why the template had to be ignored in that specific case.
Strictly speaking the core competency of Rex is to execute commands, manage files, define tasks, and orchestrate their execution.
Rex gained lots of other capabilities over time, and historically many of them landed in core as well. But it is often possible to extend Rex by only minimally changing the core, if at all. For example this includes adding support to:
- manage new operating systems
- new shell types
- new virtualization methods
- new cloud providers
It is highly encouraged to add such new capabilities via their own extension modules outside the core. If in doubt, please check some of the common scenarios below, or contact us.
Rex is expected to run wherever Perl can run. This includes Linux, BSDs, Mac OS X, Windows and possibly others. Patches and guides about how to run Rex on even more platforms are more than welcome!
As a general rule, running Rex is only supported on platforms which are actively maintained by their respective upstream teams.
Rex is expected to manage endpoints running various operating systems. Today, this mostly means Unix-like systems. Patches and guides about how to manage other operating systems are more than welcome!
As a general rule, managing an endpoint with Rex is only supported for platforms that are actively maintained by their respective upstream teams.
Rex aims to run even on older Perl versions up to 10 years old. Currently this means 5.12.5.
On top of the supported minimum version of Perl, the goal is to support the latest versions of all minor Perl 5 releases. That makes the full list the following:
- 5.12.5
- 5.14.4
- 5.16.3
- 5.18.4
- 5.20.3
- 5.22.4
- 5.24.4
- 5.26.3
- 5.28.3
- 5.30.3
- 5.32.1
- 5.34.1
- 5.36.1
- 5.38.2
- 5.40.0
The goal is to remain backwards compatible within major versions of Rex (which is also implied by following Dotted Semantic Versioning rules).
To still be able to introduce new features while staying backwards compatible, Rex uses feature flags. This makes it possible to selectively opt in or out of new features, depending on the needs of the given use case.
The collection of preferred settings for a specific version of Rex can also be enabled via feature flags named after the minor releases.
The goal is to have pairs of feature flags for opting in and out.
Features and code paths may be dropped by following a planned deprecation procedure. In order to provide a transition period for the users, there should be warnings about the deprecation before the behavior is changed.
If a supported OS gets deprecated, we may try to keep it supported while it doesn't cause any problems. As soon a retired OS starts to cause bugs, or gets in the way of progress, it is a candidate to be dropped from support.
In other words, we may choose to be lazy to keep the support around, but it's probably not worth putting effort actively into something that is not supported anymore even by their own creators.
In case you depend on a deprecated feature, or must use or manage a retired OS, you might be interested to get community or commercial support.
Rex uses Perl::Tidy to format its codebase according to the rules described in .perltidyrc. All contributions are expected to be formatted using the same rules.
To avoid unnecessary "tidy only" commits, we recommend to integrate formatting directly into your workflow, for example via a git pre-commit hook, or via your editor as a shortcut or automatic action.
It is important to note that the emphasis is not on the formatting rules themselves, but on having a consistent layout throughout the codebase. Since .perltidyrc is part of the repo, it can also be the subject of contributions.
Rex uses Test::Perl::Critic::Progressive to make sure every change follows best practices described by the code quality rules in .perlcriticrc, and no new violations are introduced accidentally.
Since .perlcriticrc is part of the repo, it can also be the subject of contributions. In fact, improving the rules and the codebase in this regard is highly welcome.
Rex has two major test suites:
- the unit tests included with the code, which are exercising various modules and features
- the functional tests in the RexOps/rex-build repo, which are making sure Rex can manage actual VMs running various OSes
In general, when adding a new feature or when changing behavior, tests should be added too, and all previous tests should still pass.
In order to make it easier to follow the guidelines listed here, these should also have corresponding tests as well.
It is highly important to have fun while using Rex or contributing to it. If it is not the case, then that's probably a bug somewhere, so please let us know.
The Rex project uses Git for version control of the source code. The repository is hosted on GitHub.
It is recommended (but optional) to use a separate Perl environment for development, like the ones you can manage with Perlbrew.
The code and examples use cpanm to install modules from CPAN.
Rex uses Dist::Zilla as an authoring tool. With that, installing dependencies can be done by the following commands after cloning the source code:
dzil authordeps | cpanm
dzil listdeps | cpanm
Some of the optional dependencies might not be available on all platforms, but to install them as well, use this command:
dzil listdeps --suggests | cpanm
To install remaining OS-specific dependencies and Rex itself, run:
dzil install
To install the OS-specific dependencies only, run one of these commands depending on your OS:
- Windows:
cpanm Net::SSH2 - non-Windows:
cpanm Net::OpenSSH Net::SFTP::Foreign IO::Pty
Perltidy takes care of maintaining a consistent source code formatting.
Perlcritic makes sure the codebase keeps following best practices and minimum quality requirements.
The test suite included with the source code of Rex can be executed with prove:
prove --lib --recurse t/
Extended, author and release tests may need further dependencies, before being executed with dzil:
dzil listdeps --author --missing | cpanm
dzil test --all
It's particularly important to run the progressive perlcritic tests on the default branch before modifying the code base. This generates baseline data to compare against later:
rm xt/author/.perlcritic-history
prove --lib xt/author/critic-progressive.t
The preferred way for sending contributions is to fork the repository on GitHub, and send pull requests against the default branch of the repository.
It is recommended to use feature branches when working on contributions. This makes it easy to separate the commits related to a specific changeset from the main line of development, while still keeping them together in one place.
Ideally, a single commit:
- represents a single logical change
- has a readable commit message
- passes tests in itself
There are many articles written on the topic, but this is a good example about how to write a git commit message.
It is generally recommended to:
- add new breaking tests on a first commit before changing the code to fix them on a follow up commit
- use multiple commits in a single pull request to separate logical steps, and to help understanding the changes as long as the history is still easy to follow and read
- open draft pull requests to share the idea and ask for feedback early
- rebase your feature branch on top of the default branch if there are new commits since the feature branch has been created
- use follow up/clean up commits on the same PR, but then please also squash related commits together in the feature branch before merging in order to keep a tidy history (in other words, no "tidy only" or "fix typo" commits are necessary)
Allowing Rex to manage a new OS requires the following steps:
-
Teach rex about how to detect the given OS
- add a way to
Rex::Hardware::Host::get_operating_system()to detect the given OS - add a new
is_myos()function toRex::Commands::Gather
- add a way to
-
Let Rex choose the proper package and service management modules for the given OS
- modify
Rex::ServiceandRex::Pkg
- modify
-
Add new service and package management modules specific to the given OS
- add
Rex::Service::MyOS - add
Rex::Pkg::MyOS
- add
Assuming the new virtualization method is called MyVirt, the following steps are required:
- create the top-level
Rex::Virtualization::MyVirtmodule which includes the constructor, and the documentation - create submodules for each virtualization command, e.g.
Rex::Virtualization::MyVirt::info - implement the logic of the given command as the
executemethod
If you think some of the information here is outdated, not clear enough, or have bugs, feel free to contribute to it too!