CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Pull requests for bug fixes are welcome, but before submitting new features or changes to current functionality open an issue and discuss your ideas or propose the changes you wish to make. After a resolution is reached a PR can be submitted for review.

Requirements

To build the full project from the command line you need to have JDK versions for 7,8,11, and 14 installed on your machine, as well as the following environment variables set up: JAVA_7_HOME, JAVA_8_HOME, JAVA_11_HOME, JAVA_14_HOME, pointing to the respective JDK.

In contrast to the IntelliJ IDEA setup the default JVM to build and run tests from the command line should be Java 8.

Building

To build the project without running tests run:

./gradlew clean assemble

To build the entire project with tests (this can take a very long time) run:

./gradlew clean build

Adding Instrumentations

All instrumentations are in the directory /dd-java-agent/instrumentation/$framework?/$framework-$minVersion, where $framework is the framework name, and $minVersion is the minimum version of the framework supported by the instrumentation. In some cases, such as Hibernate, there is a submodule containing different version-specific instrumentations, but typically a version-specific module is enough when there is only one instrumentation implemented (e.g. Akka-HTTP). When adding an instrumentation to /dd-java-agent/instrumentation/$framework?/$framework-$minVersion, an include must be added to settings.gradle:

include ':dd-java-agent:instrumentation:$framework?:$framework-$minVersion'

Note that the includes are maintained in alphabetical order.

An instrumentation consists of the following components:

• An Instrumentation
  • Must implement Instrumenter - note that it is recommended to implement Instrumenter.Default in every case.
  • The instrumentation must be annotated with @AutoService(Instrumenter.class) for annotation processing.
  • The instrumentation must declare a type matcher by implementing the method typeMatcher(), which matches the types the instrumentation will transform.
  • The instrumentation must declare every class it needs to load (except for Datadog bootstrap classes, and for the framework itself) in helperClassNames(). It is recommended to keep the number of classes to a minimum both to reduce deployment size and optimise startup time.
  • If state must be associated with instances of framework types, a definition of the context store by implementing contextStore().
  • The method transformers(): this is a map of method matchers to the Bytebuddy advice class which handles matching methods. For example, if you want to inject an instance of com.foo.Foo into a com.bar.Bar (or fall back to a weak map backed association if this is impossible) you would return singletonMap("com.foo.Foo", "com.bar.Bar"). It may be tempting to write Foo.class.getName(), but this will lead to the class being loaded during bootstrapping, which is usually not safe. See the section on the context store for more details.
• A Decorator.
  • This will typically extend one of decorator implementations, which provide templates for span enrichment behaviour. For example, all instrumentations for HTTP server frameworks have decorators which extend HttpServerDecorator.
  • The name of this class must be included in the instrumentation's helper class names, as it will need to be loaded with the instrumentation.
• Advice
  • Snippets of code to be inserted at the entry or exit of a method.
  • Associated with the methods they apply to by the instrumentation's transformers() method.
• Any more classes required to implement the instrumentation, which must be included in the instrumentation's helper class names.

Verifying Instrumentations

There are four verification strategies, three of which are mandatory.

Muzzle directive

A muzzle directive which checks for a range of framework versions that it would be safe to load the instrumentation. At the top of the instrumentation's gradle file, the following would be added (see rediscala)

      muzzle {
        pass {
          group = "com.github.etaty"
          module = "rediscala_2.11"
          versions = "[1.5.0,)"
          assertInverse = true
        }

        pass {
          group = "com.github.etaty"
          module = "rediscala_2.12"
          versions = "[1.8.0,)"
          assertInverse = true
        }
      }

This means that the instrumentation should be safe with rediscala_2.11 from version 1.5.0 and all later versions, but should fail (and so will not be loaded), for older versions (see assertInverse). A similar range of versions is specified for rediscala_2.12. When the agent is built, the muzzle plugin will download versions of the framework and check these directives hold. To run muzzle on your instrumentation, run:

 ./gradlew :dd-java-agent:instrumentation:rediscala-1.8.0:muzzle

• ⚠️ Muzzle does not run tests. It checks that the types and methods used by the instrumentation are present in particular versions of libraries. It can be subverted with MethodHandle and reflection, so muzzle passing is not the end of the story.

Instrumentation Tests

Tests are written in Groovy using the Spock framework. For instrumentations, AgentTestRunner must be extended by the test fixture. For e.g. HTTP server frameworks, there are base tests which enforce consistency between different implementations - see HttpServerTest

When writing an instrumentation it is much faster to test just the instrumentation rather than build the entire project, for example:

./gradlew :dd-java-agent:instrumentation:play-ws-2.1:test

Latest Dependency Tests

Adding a directive to the build file lets us get early warning when breaking changes are released by framework maintainers. For example, for Play 2.4, based on the following:

  latestDepTestCompile group: 'com.typesafe.play', name: 'play-java_2.11', version: '2.5.+'
  latestDepTestCompile group: 'com.typesafe.play', name: 'play-java-ws_2.11', version: '2.5.+'
  latestDepTestCompile(group: 'com.typesafe.play', name: 'play-test_2.11', version: '2.5.+') {
    exclude group: 'org.eclipse.jetty.websocket', module: 'websocket-client'
  }

We download the latest dependency and run tests against it.

Smoke tests

These are tests which run with a real agent jar file set as the javaagent. See here. These are optional and not all frameworks have these, but contributions are very welcome.

Automatic code formatting

This project includes a .editorconfig file for basic editor settings. This file is supported by most common text editors.

We have automatic code formatting enabled in Gradle configuration using Spotless Gradle plugin. Main goal is to avoid extensive reformatting caused by different IDEs having different opinion about how things should be formatted by establishing single 'point of truth'.

Running

./gradlew spotlessApply

reformats all the files that need reformatting.

Running

./gradlew spotlessCheck

runs formatting verify task only.

Pre-commit hook

There is a pre-commit hook setup to verify formatting before committing. It can be activated with this command:

git config core.hooksPath .githooks

Intellij IDEA

Compiler settings:

• OpenJDK 11 must be installed to build the entire project. Under SDKs it must have the name 11.
• Under Build, Execution, Deployment > Compiler > Java Compiler disable Use '--release' option for cross-compilation

Suggested plugins and settings:

• Editor > Code Style > Java/Groovy > Imports
  • Class count to use import with '*': 9999 (some number sufficiently large that is unlikely to matter)
  • Names count to use static import with '*': 9999
  • With java use the following import layout (groovy should still use the default) to ensure consistency with google-java-format:
• Google Java Format
• Save Actions

Troubleshooting

• P: When Gradle is building the project, the error Could not find netty-transport-native-epoll-4.1.43.Final-linux-x86_64.jar is shown.
  • S: Execute rm -rf ~/.m2/repository/io/netty/netty-transport* in a Terminal and re-build again.