Contributing to the Spring Framework

First off, thank you for taking the time to contribute!

Table of Contents

• Code of Conduct
• How to Contribute
  • Discuss
  • Create a Ticket
  • Ticket Lifecycle
  • Submit a Pull Request
• Build from Source
• Source Code Style
• Reference Docs

Code of Conduct

This project is governed by the Spring Code of Conduct. By participating you are expected to uphold this code. Please report unacceptable behavior to spring-code-of-conduct@pivotal.io.

How to Contribute

Discuss

If you have a question, check Stack Overflow using this list of tags, organized by Spring project. Find an existing discussion, or start a new one if necessary.

If you suspect an issue, perform a search in the GitHub issue tracker, using a few different keywords. When you find related issues and discussions, prior or current, it helps you to learn, and it helps us to make a decision.

Create a Ticket

Reporting an issue or making a feature request is a great way to contribute. Your feedback and the conversations that result from it provide a continuous flow of ideas.

Before you create a ticket, please take the time to research first.

If creating a ticket after a discussion on Stack Overflow, please provide a self-sufficient description in the ticket, independent of the details on Stack Overflow. We understand this is extra work, but the issue tracker is an important place of record for design discussions and decisions that can often be referenced long after the fix version — for example to revisit decisions, to understand the origin of a feature, and so on.

Once you're ready, create a ticket in the GitHub issue tracker.

Ticket Lifecycle

When an issue is first created, it is flagged waiting-for-triage waiting for a team member to triage it. Within a day or two, the issue will then be reviewed, and the team may ask for further information if needed. Based on the findings, the issue is either assigned a fix version or declined.

When a fix is ready, the issue is closed and may still be re-opened. Once a fix is released, the issue can't be reopened. If necessary, you will need to create a new, related ticket with a fresh description.

Submit a Pull Request

You can contribute a source code change by submitting a pull request.

1. If you have not previously done so, please sign the Contributor License Agreement. You will also be reminded automatically when you submit a pull request.

2. Should you create a ticket first? The answer is no. Just create the pull request and use the description to provide context and motivation, as you would for an issue. If you want to start a discussion first or have already created an issue, once a pull request is created, we will close the issue as superseded by the pull request, and the discussion of the issue will continue under the pull request.

3. Always check out the master branch and submit pull requests against it (for target version see settings.gradle). Backports to prior versions will be considered on a case-by-case basis and reflected as the fix version in the issue tracker.

4. Use short branch names, preferably based on the GitHub issue (e.g. 22276), or otherwise using succinct, lower-case, dash (-) delimited names, such as fix-warnings.

5. Choose the granularity of your commits consciously and squash commits that represent multiple edits or corrections of the same logical change. See Rewriting History section of Pro Git for an overview of streamlining the commit history.

6. Format commit messages using 55 characters for the subject line, 72 characters per line for the description, followed by the issue fixed, e.g. Closes gh-22276. See the Commit Guidelines section of Pro Git for best practices around commit messages, and use git log to see some examples.

7. List the GitHub issue number in the PR description.

If accepted, your contribution may be heavily modified as needed prior to merging. You will likely retain author attribution for your Git commits granted that the bulk of your changes remain intact. You may also be asked to rework the submission.

If asked to make corrections, simply push the changes against the same branch, and your pull request will be updated. In other words, you do not need to create a new pull request when asked to make changes.

Participate in Reviews

Helping to review pull requests is another great way to contribute. Your feedback can help to shape the implementation of new features. When reviewing pull requests, however, please refrain from approving or rejecting a PR unless you are a core committer for the Spring Framework.

Build from Source

See the Build from Source wiki page for instructions on how to check out, build, and import the Spring Framework source code into your IDE.

Source Code Style

The wiki pages Code Style and IntelliJ IDEA Editor Settings define the source file coding standards we use along with some IDEA editor settings we customize.

Reference Docs

The reference documentation is in the src/docs/asciidoc directory, in Asciidoctor format. For trivial changes, you may be able to browse, edit source files, and submit directly from GitHub.

When making changes locally, execute ./gradlew asciidoctor and then browse the result under build/asciidoc/html5/index.html.

Asciidoctor also supports live editing. For more details read Editing AsciiDoc with Live Preview. Note that if you choose the System Monitor option, you can find a Guardfile under src/docs/asciidoc.