# How to contribute
We definitely welcome your patches and contributions to gRPC! Please read the gRPC
organization's [governance rules](https://github.com/grpc/grpc-community/blob/master/governance.md)
and [contribution guidelines](https://github.com/grpc/grpc-community/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md) before proceeding.
If you are new to github, please start by reading [Pull Request howto](https://help.github.com/articles/about-pull-requests/)
## Legal requirements
In order to protect both you and ourselves, you will need to sign the
[Contributor License Agreement](https://identity.linuxfoundation.org/projects/cncf).
## Guidelines for Pull Requests
How to get your contributions merged smoothly and quickly.
- Create **small PRs** that are narrowly focused on **addressing a single
concern**. We often times receive PRs that are trying to fix several things at
a time, but only one fix is considered acceptable, nothing gets merged and
both author's & review's time is wasted. Create more PRs to address different
concerns and everyone will be happy.
- If you are searching for features to work on, issues labeled [Status: Help
Wanted](https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Aupdated-desc+label%3A%22Status%3A+Help+Wanted%22)
is a great place to start. These issues are well-documented and usually can be
resolved with a single pull request.
- If you are adding a new file, make sure it has the copyright message template
at the top as a comment. You can copy over the message from an existing file
and update the year.
- The grpc package should only depend on standard Go packages and a small number
of exceptions. If your contribution introduces new dependencies which are NOT
in the [list](https://godoc.org/google.golang.org/grpc?imports), you need a
discussion with gRPC-Go authors and consultants.
- For speculative changes, consider opening an issue and discussing it first. If
you are suggesting a behavioral or API change, consider starting with a [gRFC
proposal](https://github.com/grpc/proposal).
- Provide a good **PR description** as a record of **what** change is being made
and **why** it was made. Link to a github issue if it exists.
- If you want to fix formatting or style, consider whether your changes are an
obvious improvement or might be considered a personal preference. If a style
change is based on preference, it likely will not be accepted. If it corrects
widely agreed-upon anti-patterns, then please do create a PR and explain the
benefits of the change.
- Unless your PR is trivial, you should expect there will be reviewer comments
that you'll need to address before merging. We'll mark it as `Status: Requires
Reporter Clarification` if we expect you to respond to these comments in a
timely manner. If the PR remains inactive for 6 days, it will be marked as
`stale` and automatically close 7 days after that if we don't hear back from
you.
- Maintain **clean commit history** and use **meaningful commit messages**. PRs
with messy commit history are difficult to review and won't be merged. Use
`rebase -i upstream/master` to curate your commit history and/or to bring in
latest changes from master (but avoid rebasing in the middle of a code
review).
- Keep your PR up to date with upstream/master (if there are merge conflicts, we
can't really merge your change).
- **All tests need to be passing** before your change can be merged. We
recommend you **run tests locally** before creating your PR to catch breakages
early on.
- `./scripts/vet.sh` to catch vet errors
- `go test -cpu 1,4 -timeout 7m ./...` to run the tests
- `go test -race -cpu 1,4 -timeout 7m ./...` to run tests in race mode
- Exceptions to the rules can be made if there's a compelling reason for doing so.
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