Contributing

Thank you for thinking of contributing! We very much welcome contributions from the community. To make the process easier and more valuable for everyone involved we have a few rules and guidelines to follow.

Anyone with a Github account is free to file issues on the project. However, if you want to contribute documentation or code then you will need to sign InfluxData's Individual Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which can be found with more information on our website.

Submitting Issues and Feature Requests

Before you file an issue, please search existing issues in case the same or similar issues have already been filed. If you find an existing open ticket covering your issue then please avoid adding "👍" or "me too" comments; Github notifications can cause a lot of noise for the project maintainers who triage the back-log. However, if you have a new piece of information for an existing ticket and you think it may help the investigation or resolution, then please do add it as a comment! You can signal to the team that you're experiencing an existing issue with one of Github's emoji reactions (these are a good way to add "weight" to an issue from a prioritisation perspective).

Submitting an Issue

The New Issue page has templates for both bug reports and feature requests. Please fill one of them out! The issue templates provide details on what information we will find useful to help us fix an issue. In short though, the more information you can provide us about your environment and what behaviour you're seeing, the easier we can fix the issue. If you can push a PR with test cases that trigger a defect or bug, even better! P.S, if you have never written a bug report before, or if you want to brush up on your bug reporting skills, we recommend reading Simon Tatham's essay How to Report Bugs Effectively.

As well as bug reports we also welcome feature requests (there is a dedicated issue template for these). Typically, the maintainers will periodically review community feature requests and make decisions about if we want to add them. For features we don't plan to support we will close the feature request ticket (so, again, please check closed tickets for feature requests before submitting them).

Contributing Changes

InfluxDB IOx is written mostly in idiomatic Rust—please see the Style Guide for more details. All code must adhere to the rustfmt format, and pass all of the clippy checks we run in CI (there are more details further down this README).

Finding Issues To Work On

The good first issue and the help wanted labels are used to identify issues where we encourage community contributions. They both indicate issues for which we would welcome independent community contributions, but the former indicates a sub-set of these that are especially good for first-time contributors. If you want some clarifications or guidance for working on one of these issues, or you simply want to let others know that you're working on one, please leave a comment on the ticket.

Bigger Changes

If you're planning to submit significant changes, even if it relates to existing tickets please talk to the project maintainers first! The easiest way to do this is to open up a new ticket, describing the changes you plan to make and why you plan to make them. Changes that may seem obviously good to you, are not always obvious to everyone else. Example of changes where we would encourage up-front communication:

• new IOx features;
• significant refactors that move code between modules/crates etc;
• performance improvements involving new concurrency patterns or the use of unsafe code;
• API-breaking changes, or changes that require a data migration;
• any changes that risk the durability or correctness of data.

We are always excited to have community involvement but we can't accept everything. To avoid having your hard work rejected the best approach to start a discussion first. Further, please don't expect us to accept significant changes without new test coverage, and/or in the case of performance changes benchmarks that show the improvements.

Making a PR

To open a PR you will need to have a Github account. Fork the influxdb_iox repo and work on a branch on your fork. When you have completed your changes, or you want some incremental feedback make a Pull Request to InfluxDB IOx here.

If you want to discuss some work in progress then please prefix [WIP] to the PR title.

For PRs that you consider ready for review, verify the following locally before you submit it:

• you have a coherent set of logical commits, with messages conforming to the Conventional Commits specification;
• all the tests and/or benchmarks pass, including documentation tests;
• the code is correctly formatted and all clippy checks pass; and
• you haven't left any "code cruft" (commented out code blocks etc).

There are some tips on verifying the above in the next section.

After submitting a PR, you should:

• verify that all CI status checks pass and the PR is 💚;
• ask for help on the PR if any of the status checks are 🔴, and you don't know why;
• wait patiently for one of the team to review your PR, which could take a few days.

Running Tests

The cargo build tool runs tests as well. Run:

cargo test --workspace

Enabling logging in tests

To enable logging to stderr during a run of cargo test set the Rust RUST_LOG environment varable. For example, to see all INFO messages:

RUST_LOG=info cargo test --workspace

Since this feature uses EnvFilter internally, you can use all the features of that crate. For example, to disable the (somewhat noisy) logs in some h2 modules, you can use a value of RUST_LOG such as:

RUST_LOG=debug,hyper::proto::h1=info,h2=info cargo test --workspace

End-to-End Tests

There are end-to-end tests that spin up a server and make requests via the client library and API. They can be found in tests/end_to_end_cases

They are run by cargo test --workspace command but can be run exclusively with:

cargo test --test end_to_end

Each server writes its logs to a temporary file and this is captured when the server shutsdown.

If you are debugging a failing end-to-end test, you will likely want to run with --nocapture to also get the logs from the test execution in addition to the server:

cargo test --test end_to_end -- my_failing_test --nocapture

If running multiple tests in parallel:

• The output may be interleaved
• Multiple tests may share the same server instance and thus the server logs may be captured in the output of a different test than the one that is failing.

When debugging a failing test it is therefore recommended you run a single test, or disable parallel test execution

cargo test --test end_to_end -- --test-threads 1

Finally, if you wish to increase the verbosity of the server logging, you can set LOG_FILTER as you would for a normal IOx instance.

env LOG_FILTER=debug cargo test --package influxdb_iox --test end_to_end end_to_end_cases::operations_api::test_operations -- --nocapture

Visually showing explain plans

Some query plans are output in the log in graphviz format. To display them you can use the tools/iplan helper.

For example, if you want to display this plan:

// Begin DataFusion GraphViz Plan (see https://graphviz.org)
digraph {
  subgraph cluster_1
  {
    graph[label="LogicalPlan"]
    2[shape=box label="SchemaPivot"]
    3[shape=box label="Projection: "]
    2 -> 3 [arrowhead=none, arrowtail=normal, dir=back]
    4[shape=box label="Filter: Int64(0) LtEq #time And #time Lt Int64(10000) And #host Eq Utf8(_server01_)"]
    3 -> 4 [arrowhead=none, arrowtail=normal, dir=back]
    5[shape=box label="TableScan: attributes projection=None"]
    4 -> 5 [arrowhead=none, arrowtail=normal, dir=back]
  }
  subgraph cluster_6
  {
    graph[label="Detailed LogicalPlan"]
    7[shape=box label="SchemaPivot\nSchema: [non_null_column:Utf8]"]
    8[shape=box label="Projection: \nSchema: []"]
    7 -> 8 [arrowhead=none, arrowtail=normal, dir=back]
    9[shape=box label="Filter: Int64(0) LtEq #time And #time Lt Int64(10000) And #host Eq Utf8(_server01_)\nSchema: [color:Utf8;N, time:Int64]"]
    8 -> 9 [arrowhead=none, arrowtail=normal, dir=back]
    10[shape=box label="TableScan: attributes projection=None\nSchema: [color:Utf8;N, time:Int64]"]
    9 -> 10 [arrowhead=none, arrowtail=normal, dir=back]
  }
}
// End DataFusion GraphViz Plan

You can pipe it to iplan and render as a .pdf

Running rustfmt and clippy

CI will check the code formatting with rustfmt and Rust best practices with clippy.

To automatically format your code according to rustfmt style, first make sure rustfmt is installed using rustup:

rustup component add rustfmt

Then, whenever you make a change and want to reformat, run:

cargo fmt --all

Similarly with clippy, install with:

rustup component add clippy

And run with:

cargo clippy --all-targets --workspace -- -D warnings

Upgrading the flatbuffers crate

IOx uses Flatbuffers for some of its messages. The structure is defined in entry/src/entry.fbs. We have then used the flatc Flatbuffers compiler to generate the corresponding Rust code in entry/src/entry_generated.rs, which is checked in to the repository.

The checked-in code is compatible with the flatbuffers crate version in the Cargo.lock file. If upgrading the version of the flatbuffers crate that IOx depends on, the generated code will need to be updated as well.

Instructions for updating the generated code are in docs/regenerating_flatbuffers.md.

Running Jaeger / tracing locally

IOx fits into the distributed tracing ecosystem, as described in tracing. To use, develop, or debug the distributed tracing functionality locally you can do the following:

Step 1: Run Jaeger locally

Follow instructions from https://www.jaegertracing.io/docs/1.26/getting-started/, which as of the time of this writing was:

docker run -d --name jaeger \
  -e COLLECTOR_ZIPKIN_HOST_PORT=:9411 \
  -p 5775:5775/udp \
  -p 6831:6831/udp \
  -p 6832:6832/udp \
  -p 5778:5778 \
  -p 16686:16686 \
  -p 14268:14268 \
  -p 14250:14250 \
  -p 9411:9411 \
  jaegertracing/all-in-one:1.26

Step 2: Run IOx configured to send traces to the local Jaeger instance

Build IOx and run with the following environment variable set:

TRACES_EXPORTER=jaeger
TRACES_EXPORTER_JAEGER_AGENT_HOST=localhost
TRACES_EXPORTER_JAEGER_AGENT_PORT=6831

For example, a command such as this should do the trick:

TRACES_EXPORTER=jaeger TRACES_EXPORTER_JAEGER_AGENT_HOST=localhost TRACES_EXPORTER_JAEGER_AGENT_PORT=6831 cargo run -- run -v --server-id=42

Step 3: Send a request with trace context

For IOx to emit traces, the request must have a span context set. You can use the --header flag on the IOx CLI to do so. For example

# create db
./target/debug/influxdb_iox database create my_db
# load data
./target/debug/influxdb_iox database write my_db tests/fixtures/lineproto/metrics.lp
# run a query and start a new trace 
./target/debug/influxdb_iox database query my_db  'show tables' --header jaeger-debug-id:tracing-is-a-great-idea

Step 4: Explore Spans in the UI

Navigate to the UI in your browser http://localhost:16686/search and then chose the "iox-conductor" service from the drop down.

Enjoy!