This is a short guide on how to contribute things to rclone.
If you've just got a question or aren't sure if you've found a bug then please use the rclone forum instead of filing an issue.
When filing an issue, please include the following information if possible as well as a description of the problem. Make sure you test with the latest beta of rclone:
- Rclone version (eg output from
rclone -V
) - Which OS you are using and how many bits (eg Windows 7, 64 bit)
- The command you were trying to run (eg
rclone copy /tmp remote:tmp
) - A log of the command with the
-vv
flag (eg output fromrclone -vv copy /tmp remote:tmp
)- if the log contains secrets then edit the file with a text editor first to obscure them
If you find a bug that you'd like to fix, or a new feature that you'd like to implement then please submit a pull request via Github.
If it is a big feature then make an issue first so it can be discussed.
You'll need a Go environment set up with GOPATH set. See the Go getting started docs for more info.
First in your web browser press the fork button on rclone's Github page.
Now in your terminal
go get github.com/ncw/rclone
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/ncw/rclone
git remote rename origin upstream
git remote add origin [email protected]:YOURUSER/rclone.git
Make a branch to add your new feature
git checkout -b my-new-feature
And get hacking.
When ready - run the unit tests for the code you changed
go test -v
Note that you may need to make a test remote, eg TestSwift
for some
of the unit tests.
Note the top level Makefile targets
- make check
- make test
Both of these will be run by Travis when you make a pull request but you can do this yourself locally too. These require some extra go packages which you can install with
- make build_dep
Make sure you
- Add documentation for a new feature (see below for where)
- Add unit tests for a new feature
- squash commits down to one per feature
- rebase to master
git rebase master
When you are done with that
git push origin my-new-feature
Go to the Github website and click Create pull request.
You patch will get reviewed and you might get asked to fix some stuff.
If so, then make the changes in the same branch, squash the commits,
rebase it to master then push it to Github with --force
.
rclone's tests are run from the go testing framework, so at the top level you can run this to run all the tests.
go test -v ./...
rclone contains a mixture of unit tests and integration tests. Because it is difficult (and in some respects pointless) to test cloud storage systems by mocking all their interfaces, rclone unit tests can run against any of the backends. This is done by making specially named remotes in the default config file.
If you wanted to test changes in the drive
backend, then you would
need to make a remote called TestDrive
.
You can then run the unit tests in the drive directory. These tests
are skipped if TestDrive:
isn't defined.
cd drive
go test -v
You can then run the integration tests which tests all of rclone's operations. Normally these get run against the local filing system, but they can be run against any of the remotes.
cd ../fs
go test -v -remote TestDrive:
go test -v -remote TestDrive: -subdir
If you want to run all the integration tests against all the remotes, then run in that directory
go run test_all.go
If you are adding a new feature then please update the documentation.
If you add a new flag, then if it is a general flag, document it in
docs/content/docs.md
- the flags there are supposed to be in
alphabetical order. If it is a remote specific flag, then document it
in docs/content/remote.md
.
The only documentation you need to edit are the docs/content/*.md
files. The MANUAL.*, rclone.1, web site etc are all auto generated
from those during the release process. See the make doc
and make website
targets in the Makefile if you are interested in how. You
don't need to run these when adding a feature.
Documentation for rclone sub commands is with their code, eg
cmd/ls/ls.go
.
There are separate instructions for making a release in the RELEASE.md file.
Please make the first line of your commit message a summary of the change, and prefix it with the directory of the change followed by a colon. The changelog gets made by looking at just these first lines so make it good!
If you have more to say about the commit, then enter a blank line and carry on the description. Remember to say why the change was needed - the commit itself shows what was changed.
If the change fixes an issue then write Fixes #1234
in the commit
message. This can be on the subject line if it will fit. If you
don't want to close the associated issue just put #1234
and the
change will get linked into the issue.
Here is an example of a short commit message:
drive: add team drive support - fixes #885
And here is an example of a longer one:
mount: fix hang on errored upload
In certain circumstances if an upload failed then the mount could hang
indefinitely. This was fixed by closing the read pipe after the Put
completed. This will cause the write side to return a pipe closed
error fixing the hang.
Fixes #1498
rclone uses the dep tool to manage
its dependencies. All code that rclone needs for building is stored
in the vendor
directory for perfectly reproducable builds.
The vendor
directory is entirely managed by the dep
tool.
To add a new dependency
dep ensure github.com/pkg/errors
You can add constraints on that package (see the dep
documentation),
but don't unless you really need to.
Please check in the changes generated by dep including the vendor
directory and Godep.toml
and Godep.locl
in a single commit
separate from any other code changes. Watch out for new files in
vendor
.
If you need to update a dependency then run
dep ensure -update github.com/pkg/errors
Check in in a single commit as above.
In order to update all the dependencies then run make update
. This
just runs dep ensure -update
. Check in the changes in a single
commit as above.
This should be done early in the release cycle to pick up new versions of packages in time for them to get some testing.
If you update a backend then please run the unit tests and the integration tests for that backend.
Assuming the backend is called remote
, make create a config entry
called TestRemote
for the tests to use.
Now cd remote
and run go test -v
to run the unit tests.
Then cd fs
and run go test -v -remote TestRemote:
to run the
integration tests.
The next section goes into more detail about the tests.
Choose a name. The docs here will use remote
as an example.
Note that in rclone terminology a file system backend is called a remote or an fs.
Research
- Look at the interfaces defined in
fs/fs.go
- Study one or more of the existing remotes
Getting going
- Create
remote/remote.go
(copy this from a similar remote)- onedrive is a good one to start from if you have a directory based remote
- b2 is a good one to start from if you have a bucket based remote
- Add your remote to the imports in
fs/all/all.go
- HTTP based remotes are easiest to maintain if they use rclone's rest module, but if there is a really good go SDK then use that instead.
Unit tests
- Create a config entry called
TestRemote
for the unit tests to use - Add your fs to the end of
fstest/fstests/gen_tests.go
- generate
remote/remote_test.go
unit testscd fstest/fstests; go generate
- Make sure all tests pass with
go test -v
Integration tests
- Add your fs to
fs/test_all.go
- Make sure integration tests pass with
cd fs
go test -v -remote TestRemote:
- If you are making a bucket based remote, then check with this also
go test -v -remote TestRemote: -subdir
- And if your remote defines
ListR
this alsogo test -v -remote TestRemote: -fast-list
Add your fs to the docs - you'll need to pick an icon for it from fontawesome. Keep lists of remotes in alphabetical order but with the local file system last.
README.md
- main Github pagedocs/content/remote.md
- main docs pagedocs/content/overview.md
- overview docsdocs/content/docs.md
- list of remotes in config sectiondocs/content/about.md
- front page of rclone.orgdocs/layouts/chrome/navbar.html
- add it to the website navigationbin/make_manual.py
- add the page to thedocs
constantcmd/cmd.go
- the main help for rclone