First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute! 🚀
This document is offers guidelines on how to best contribute to Routinator, whether it being new features or correcting flaws or bugs.
This project and everyone participating in it is governed by the NLnet Labs Code of Conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code.
Routinator is Relying Party software for the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI). It is based on open standards developed in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
Most of the original work on RPKI standardisation for both origin and path validation was done in the Secure Inter-Domain Routing (sidr) working group. After the work was completed, the working group was concluded. Since then, the SIDR Operations (sidrops) working group was formed. This working group develops guidelines for the operation of SIDR-aware networks, and provides operational guidance on how to deploy and operate SIDR technologies in existing and new networks.
There are more than 40 RFCs about RPKI. You don't need to know all of by heart to provide a meaningful contribution to Routinator, but we feel it's good to have some reference and context. The MANRS initiative has made an easy to use tool to view all the relevant RFCs, and how they are related.
We invite you to join the RPKI mailing list and/or Discord server. Please don't open a GitHub issue for a question. Instead, follow the discussion on the mailing list and Discord and ask questions there before you start sending patches. We prefer public discussions over private ones, so everyone in the community can participate and learn.
When contributing with code, you agree to put your changes and new code under the same license Routinator and its associated libraries is already using. When changing existing source code, do not alter the copyright of the original file(s). The copyright will still be owned by the original creator(s) or those who have been assigned copyright by the original author(s).
By submitting a patch to the Routinator project, you are assumed to have the right to the code and to be allowed by your employer or whatever to hand over that patch/code to us. We will credit you for your changes as far as possible, to give credit but also to keep a trace back to who made what changes.
The source code, documentation, man page, change log and the most recent changes in git.
We know how painful it is to write good documentation. We went through great lengths to write a proper user manual for Routinator. This documentation is edited via text files in the reStructuredText markup language and then compiled into a static website/offline document using the open source Sphinx and ReadTheDocs tools. You can contribute to the Routinator user manual by sending patches via pull requests on the routinator-manual GitHub source repository.
You can contribute to the man page by sending nroff formatted patches.
We would like you to submit a pull request on GitHub. Please note that you can create a draft pull request to indicate that you're still working on something but still share it with the maintainers to get some early feedback.
Once final, your change will be reviewed and discussed on GitHub. You will be expected to correct flaws pointed out and update accordingly. As a submitter of a change, you are the owner of that change until it has been merged.