Have something you'd like to contribute to the framework? We welcome pull requests but ask that you carefully read this document first to understand how best to submit them; what kind of changes are likely to be accepted; and what to expect from the Spring team when evaluating your submission.
Please refer back to this document as a checklist before issuing any pull request; this will save time for everyone!
Not sure what a pull request is, or how to submit one? Take a look at GitHub's excellent help documentation first.
Is there already an issue that addresses your concern? Do a bit of searching in our JIRA issue tracker to see if you can find something similar. If you do not find something similar, please create a new JIRA issue before submitting a pull request unless the change is truly trivial -- for example: typo fixes, removing compiler warnings, etc.
If you're considering anything more than correcting a typo or fixing a minor bug, please discuss it on the spring-framework-contrib mailing list before submitting a pull request. We're happy to provide guidance, but please spend an hour or two researching the subject on your own, including searching the mailing list for prior discussions.
If you have not previously done so, please fill out and submit the SpringSource CLA form. You'll receive a token when this process is complete. Keep track of this; you may be asked for it later!
Note that emailing/postal mailing a signed copy is not necessary. Submission of the web form is all that is required.
Once you've completed the web form, simply add the following in a comment on your pull request:
I have signed and agree to the terms of the SpringSource Individual
Contributor License Agreement.
You do not need to include your token/id. Please add the above statement to all future pull requests as well, simply so that the Spring Framework team knows immediately that this process is complete.
Master currently represents work toward Spring Framework 4.0. Please submit
all pull requests there, even bug fixes and minor improvements. Backports to
3.2.x
will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Branches used when submitting pull requests should preferably be named according to JIRA issues, e.g. 'SPR-1234'. Otherwise, use succinct, lower-case, dash (-) delimited names, such as 'fix-warnings', 'fix-typo', etc. In fork-and-edit cases, the GitHub default 'patch-1' is fine as well. This is important, because branch names show up in the merge commits that result from accepting pull requests and should be as expressive and concise as possible.
The complete Spring Framework Code Style reference is available on the wiki, but here's a quick summary:
Please carefully follow the whitespace and formatting conventions already present in the framework.
- Tabs, not spaces
- Unix (LF), not DOS (CRLF) line endings
- Eliminate all trailing whitespace
- Wrap Javadoc at 90 characters
- Aim to wrap code at 90 characters, but favor readability over wrapping
- Preserve existing formatting; i.e. do not reformat code for its own sake
- Search the codebase using
git grep
and other tools to discover common naming conventions, etc. - Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) encoding for Java sources; use
native2ascii
to convert if necessary
/*
* Copyright 2002-2014 the original author or authors.
*
* Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
* you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
* You may obtain a copy of the License at
*
* http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
*
* Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
* distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
* WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
* See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
* limitations under the License.
*/
package ...;
Always check the date range in the license header. For example, if you've modified a file in 2014 whose header still reads:
* Copyright 2002-2011 the original author or authors.
Then be sure to update it to 2014 accordingly:
* Copyright 2002-2014 the original author or authors.
For example:
/**
* ...
*
* @author First Last
* @since 4.0
* @see ...
*/
Search the codebase to find related tests and add additional @Test
methods
as appropriate. It is also acceptable to submit test cases on a per JIRA issue
basis, for example:
package org.springframework.beans.factory.support;
/**
* Unit tests for SPR-8954, in which a custom {@link InstantiationAwareBeanPostProcessor}
* forces the predicted type of a FactoryBean, effectively preventing retrieval of the
* bean from calls to #getBeansOfType(FactoryBean.class). The implementation of
* {@link AbstractBeanFactory#isFactoryBean(String, RootBeanDefinition)} now ensures
* that not only the predicted bean type is considered, but also the original bean
* definition's beanClass.
*
* @author Chris Beams
*/
public class Spr8954Tests {
@Test
public void cornerSpr8954() {
// ...
}
}
Use git rebase --interactive --autosquash
, git add --patch
, and other tools
to "squash" multiple commits into a single atomic commit. In addition to the man
pages for git, there are many resources online to help you understand how these
tools work. The Rewriting History section of Pro Git provides a good overview.
Please configure git to use your real first and last name for any commits you intend to submit as pull requests. For example, this is not acceptable:
Author: Nickname <[email protected]>
Rather, please include your first and last name, properly capitalized, as submitted against the SpringSource contributor license agreement:
Author: First Last <[email protected]>
This helps ensure traceability against the CLA and also goes a long way to
ensuring useful output from tools like git shortlog
and others.
You can configure this via the account admin area in GitHub (useful for fork-and-edit cases); globally on your machine with
git config --global user.name "First Last"
git config --global user.email [email protected]
or locally for the spring-framework
repository only by omitting the
'--global' flag:
cd spring-framework
git config user.name "First Last"
git config user.email [email protected]
Please read and follow the Commit Guidelines section of Pro Git.
Most importantly, please format your commit messages in the following way (adapted from the commit template in the link above):
Short (50 chars or less) summary of changes
More detailed explanatory text, if necessary. Wrap it to about 72
characters or so. In some contexts, the first line is treated as the
subject of an email and the rest of the text as the body. The blank
line separating the summary from the body is critical (unless you omit
the body entirely); tools like rebase can get confused if you run the
two together.
Further paragraphs come after blank lines.
- Bullet points are okay, too
- Typically a hyphen or asterisk is used for the bullet, preceded by a
single space, with blank lines in between, but conventions vary here
Issue: SPR-1234, SPR-1235
- Use imperative statements in the subject line, e.g. "Fix broken Javadoc link"
- Begin the subject line with a capitalized verb, e.g. "Add, Prune, Fix, Introduce, Avoid, etc."
- Do not end the subject line with a period
- Restrict the subject line to 50 characters or less if possible
- Wrap lines in the body at 72 characters or less
- Mention associated JIRA issue(s) at the end of the commit comment, prefixed with "Issue: " as above
- In the body of the commit message, explain how things worked before this commit, what has changed, and how things work now
For examples of this style, issue a git log --author=cbeams
in the
spring-framework
git repository. For convenience, here are several such commits:
- https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/commit/08e2669b84ec0faa2f7904441fe39ac70b65b078
- https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/commit/1d9d3e6ff79ce9f0eca03b02cd1df705925575da
- https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/commit/8e0b1c3a5f957af3049cfa0438317177e16d6de6
- https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/commit/b787a68f2050df179f7036b209aa741230a02477
See the building from source section of the README
for instructions. Make
sure that all tests pass prior to submitting your pull request.
Subject line:
Follow the same conventions for pull request subject lines as mentioned above for commit message subject lines.
In the body:
- Explain your use case. What led you to submit this change? Why were existing mechanisms in the framework insufficient? Make a case that this is a general-purpose problem and that yours is a general-purpose solution, etc.
- Add any additional information and ask questions; start a conversation or continue one from JIRA
- Mention the JIRA issue ID
- Also mention that you have submitted the CLA as described above
Note that for pull requests containing a single commit, GitHub will default the subject line and body of the pull request to match the subject line and body of the commit message. This is fine, but please also include the items above in the body of the request.
Add a comment to the associated JIRA issue(s) linking to your new pull request.
The Spring team takes a very conservative approach to accepting contributions to the framework. This is to keep code quality and stability as high as possible, and to keep complexity at a minimum. Your changes, if accepted, may be heavily modified prior to merging. You will retain "Author:" attribution for your Git commits granted that the bulk of your changes remain intact. You may be asked to rework the submission for style (as explained above) and/or substance. Again, we strongly recommend discussing any serious submissions with the Spring Framework team prior to engaging in serious development work.
Note that you can always force push (git push -f
) reworked / rebased commits
against the branch used to submit your pull request. In other words, you do not
need to issue a new pull request when asked to make changes.