How to contribute

ripgrep is maintained primarily by Andrew Gallant. Contributions are welcome but the project is opinionated about scope and quality. The canonical starting point is the README, the GUIDE, and the FAQ.

This section covers what you need to know to land a change.

Sub-pages

• Development workflow — branch, build, test, PR
• Testing — unit tests, integration tests, the tests/ harness
• Debugging — --debug, --trace, common pitfalls
• Patterns and conventions — coding style and project conventions
• Tooling — formatting, linting, CI, release

Pickup expectations

• The repository is BurntSushi/ripgrep on GitHub. The default branch is master.
• Open an issue before starting non-trivial work. Andrew is responsive and explicit about whether a feature fits ripgrep's scope.
• Bug reports should include the output of rg --version, the platform, and a minimal reproduction.
• The release-notes-of-record is CHANGELOG.md, not GitHub release notes. PRs that fix bugs should add a BUG #NNNN entry; new features add FEATURE #NNNN.

Definition of done

A change is mergeable when:

1. cargo test --all passes locally.
2. cargo clippy --all is clean (no new warnings introduced).
3. cargo fmt has been run; rustfmt.toml controls style.
4. CI is green across all platforms in .github/workflows/ci.yml.
5. New behaviour has either an integration test in tests/feature.rs (or a more specific file) or a unit test alongside the affected code.
6. CHANGELOG.md has an entry under the TBD section.
7. New flags include both short and long doc strings (Flag::doc_short and Flag::doc_long); see Patterns and conventions.

Scope

ripgrep aims to be fast, correct, and portable. Common reasons a feature is rejected:

• It would slow down the default search path, even slightly.
• It would require depending on a non-portable system library.
• It can be done by chaining ripgrep with another tool (e.g., delta for syntax-highlighted output).
• It duplicates functionality already provided by --pre (preprocessor) or --pre-glob.

When in doubt, file an issue first.