Tooling

CockroachDB ships an unusual amount of in-repo tooling. The most important pieces:

./dev and Bazel

./dev (source: pkg/cmd/dev/) is the primary command-line interface for everything build-related. It is a thin wrapper around Bazel that adds aliases, fixes UX rough edges, and lifts artifacts out of Bazel's output tree.

Command	Purpose
./dev doctor	Validate the local environment
./dev build / ./dev build short	Build the cockroach binary
./dev test pkg/...	Run unit tests
./dev testlogic	Run SQL logic tests
./dev gen go / ./dev gen bazel / ./dev gen	Code generation
./dev lint --short	Run the linters

Bazel rules live next to Go code as BUILD.bazel. Gazelle (./dev gen bazel) keeps them in sync with imports. The dependency manifest is DEPS.bzl (~580 KB), regenerated whenever vendored deps change.

crlfmt

The CRDB-specific Go formatter, source under pkg/cmd/. It enforces 100-column code, 80-column comments, and CRDB import grouping. Run crlfmt -w -tab 2 path.go per-file before pushing.

Code generation

CockroachDB generates a lot of Go code at build time. Examples:

• Protobuf — every .proto produces *.pb.go via protoc-gen-gogoroach (pkg/cmd/protoc-gen-gogoroach).
• DRPC — every service produces a DRPC variant via pkg/cmd/protoc-gen-go-drpc.
• Optgen — .opt files in pkg/sql/opt/norm/rules/ and pkg/sql/opt/xform/rules/ compile to Go through pkg/sql/opt/optgen/.
• Stringer / enumstringer — typed enums get string serialization helpers.
• execgen — vectorized engine code is templated through pkg/sql/colexec/execgen/.
• Mocks — interfaces for testing are mocked via mockgen.
• SQL grammar — pkg/sql/parser/sql.y compiled by goyacc.
• Schema migrations — bootstrap data in pkg/cmd/sql-bootstrap-data/ and pkg/sql/catalog/bootstrap/.

./dev gen regenerates everything; per-target invocations (./dev gen protobuf, ./dev gen go) are faster.

Dev binaries (pkg/cmd/)

The pkg/cmd/ directory contains ~70 distinct command-line tools. Notable ones:

Tool	What it does
roachprod	Provision and manage cloud-hosted CockroachDB clusters for testing.
roachtest	Long-running distributed system tests against roachprod-managed clusters.
workload	Synthetic SQL workload generator (TPC-C, KV, ycsb, etc.).
roachvet	CockroachDB-specific Go vet checks.
dev	The build wrapper described above.
release	Release engineering automation.
roachprod-microbench	Cross-revision performance benchmarks.
microbench-ci	The CI side of microbenchmarks.
whoownsit	Identify owning team for a path via .github/CODEOWNERS.
urlcheck	Validate URLs in markdown docs.
github-post, github-pull-request-make	CI ↔ GitHub integration.
bazci	Adapter that runs Bazel inside CI.

Many of these tools are themselves substantial CockroachDB-internal projects.

Linters

The lint suite combines golangci-lint, staticcheck, and CRDB-specific lint rules in pkg/testutils/lint/. It enforces things like:

• Wrapf over Wrap/fmt.Errorf for error wrapping.
• No raw time.Now() in non-clock code.
• No panic outside startup paths.
• Reasonable use of context.Context.
• Forbidden imports between layers (e.g., pkg/storage cannot depend on pkg/sql).

./dev lint --short runs a fast subset; ./dev lint runs the full set.

Skill scripts

The repo's CLAUDE.md lists three Cockroach-Labs-specific Claude Code skills:

• /commit-helper — generates commit and PR messages with release-note annotations.
• /file-crdb-issue — files GitHub issues using the CRDB templates.
• /review-crdb — reviews PRs for correctness and reviewability.

External contributors can ignore these; they are wired up to internal Cockroach Labs workflows.

CI

CI is driven from .github/workflows/ (lighter checks like CLA, codeowners, lint) and TeamCity (the heavy lifting: full test suite, race, stress, roachtests, mixed-version, …). The .github/ directory also holds CODEOWNERS for review routing and issue templates for filing bugs.

The merge bot is craig[bot]. PRs land via /trunk merge rather than the GitHub merge button. The bot rebases, re-runs CI, and only merges if green.

Pre-commit hook

CockroachDB ships a pre-commit crlfmt hook in githooks/ (must be installed manually with git config core.hooksPath githooks). It runs crlfmt on staged files.