How to contribute

This section captures what a Moby contributor needs to know to make a useful PR. The authoritative documents in the repo are CONTRIBUTING.md and docs/contributing/; this wiki summarizes them and adds practical pointers.

Sub-pages

• Development workflow — branches, commits, PRs, reviews.
• Testing — what to run before opening a PR.
• Debugging — daemon logs, pprof, common failure modes.
• Patterns and conventions — coding style and architectural rules.
• Tooling — Makefile, hack/, golangci-lint, CI.

What contributions look like

Per CONTRIBUTING.md:

• Code goes under api/, client/, daemon/, integration/, cmd/, or contrib/. The repo root is for build/config files only.
• New utility code prefers daemon/internal/ over the legacy public pkg/.
• The integration-cli/ suite is closed for new tests; new tests go in integration/<area>/.
• All commits must include a Signed-off-by trailer (DCO) — git commit -s.

Process at a glance

1. Open or claim an issue. Significant features should be discussed before code is written.
2. Fork, branch, and code. Follow the patterns and conventions.
3. Run make validate and make test-unit locally.
4. Open a PR. CI runs validate, unit, integration, Windows, and BuildKit checks (see .github/workflows/).
5. Two maintainers (commit bit holders, see MAINTAINERS) approve the PR before merge.

The full review process for non-trivial changes is documented in project/REVIEWING.md.

Where to ask

• GitHub issues for bugs and feature discussion.
• The Moby Slack workspace (linked from README.md).
• Periodic Moby Summit events.