How to contribute

This section is the practical reference for working in the repository: development workflow, testing, debugging, conventions, and the build tooling.

The canonical sources of truth are:

• AGENTS.md at the repo root — the structured overview that AI assistants are expected to read.
• CONTRIBUTING.md → docs/public/guidelines/contributing.md.
• datadoghq.dev/datadog-agent — the rendered developer site.

The pages in this section summarize the relevant parts of those documents and add context that comes from reading the code.

Subsections

• Development workflow — branches, PRs, merge queue, release notes.
• Testing — unit, integration, E2E, kernel matrix testing.
• Debugging — flares, expvar, pprof, gohai.
• Patterns and conventions — dda inv-only rule, build tag etiquette, component patterns.
• Tooling — dda and Invoke task catalog, Bazel, pre-commit, code generation.

Quick reference

Task	Command
Install dev tools	dda inv install-tools
Build the core Agent	dda inv agent.build --build-exclude=systemd
Run all tests	dda inv test
Run tests for one package	dda inv test --targets=./pkg/aggregator
Run Go linter	dda inv linter.go
Run all linters	dda inv linter.all
Tidy go.mod and BUILD.bazel	dda inv tidy
Add release note	dda inv release.add-release-note <title>
Bazel build (eBPF)	bazel build //pkg/ebpf:all_ebpf_programs
Run E2E in one area	dda inv new-e2e-tests.run --targets=./tests/<area>/...

Definition of done

A change is "done" when:

1. It builds for every relevant binary. Use dda inv *.build to verify; CI also covers the matrix.
2. dda inv linter.go and dda inv linter.all pass. Pre-commit hooks catch most lint issues locally.
3. Tests cover the change. Add or update unit tests; if the change affects a user-visible payload, add or update an E2E test (test/new-e2e/).
4. Release notes are present. New features and bug fixes go through dda inv release.add-release-note.
5. Documentation is updated in the same PR. Code comments, doc-strings, docs/public/, and any AGENTS.md files that mention the changed area must reflect the new state. The repo treats stale docs as bugs.
6. CODEOWNERS-listed teams have approved. The merge queue enforces this.