Task Force objective
The project best practices task force intends to gather existing project guidelines and best practices in one central place, and identify gaps that may be addressed in parallel or future task forces.
Task Force expected output
The expected output is a centrally located concise reference document to make project maintainers and contributors aware of the universe of project related guidelines and best practices, along with links to the various resources available to them for further learning and adoption. Follow-on targeted task forces may be proposed.
NOTE: This wiki page is intended for initial brainstorming and collaboration. Eventually the task force output will be
The content is being published at https://toc.hyperledger.org/ and follow-on targeted task forces may be proposed./ , see Pull Request https://github.com/hyperledger/toc/pull/111
...
Proposed project best practices (with links to existing content, related task forces, etc)
Maintainers guidelines includes guidance and examples around:
MAINTAINERS.md with defining active and emeritus maintainers
Maintainer responsibilities
Becoming a maintainer
Removing a maintainer, see also inactivity policy
- TODO - Clarify maintainer roles and responsibilities, e.g. prioritize pull request reviews (Stephen)
Common Repository Structure includes guidance around required and recommended repository files such as:
- Required
README.md
CONTRIBUTING.md
LICENSE
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
SECURITY.md
CHANGELOG.md
MAINTAINERS.md
- CI files
- Recommended
NOTICE
License headers on all source files
Build files
Test files
No executable binaries
Inclusive naming includes guidance around:
Switching 'master' to 'main' branch
Inclusive naming conventions
Inclusive language statement
- Optionally use GitHub Action DCI-Lint
Project Incubation Exit Criteria includes high level guidance applicable to any Incubation or Graduated project:
Legal - Apache 2 license
Community support - Active and diverse contributors, plus see Community section below
Test coverage - Automated unit and integration test suites
Documentation - plus see Documentation section below
Infrastructure - plus see Common Repository Structure and Community sections
Security - plus see Security section below
OpenSSF Best Practices Badge - https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/en
- NOTE - As the TOC comes to consensus on more best practices, we could add those to Project Incubation Exit Criteria.
Project Governance
Use an RFC process (or similar process) for driving consensus and tracking agreement on project major decisions, features, design, etc. Examples:
https://github.com/hyperledger/ariessawtooth-rfcs (same process in Ursa, Grid)
- https://github.com/hyperledger/sawtooth-rfcs (same process in Ursa, Grid/blob/main/text/0006-sawtooth-governance.md (more details on Sawtooth RFC process wrt team structure and decision making)
https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric-rfcs (evolution of sawtooth Sawtooth RFC process, example of github pages)
Community
- aries-rfcs
- Use Community Specification License v1.0 in RFC repositories - Hart to ask LF legal about next steps
- Maintainer governance - see maintainer guidelines above
- Document project roles and responsibilities (maintainers, release managers, contributors, etc)
- Document project operational procedures (including road mapping, retirements)
- TODO - Task force for defining template project roles, responsibilities, operations (see AnonCreds example - spec repo with Community Specification License, Governance)
Community
- First and foremost, foster a welcoming, positive, and public environment where contributions are encouraged - see YouTube presentation
- Decisions should be made in public, or at least socialized in public
Mailing lists - start with a single mailing list, consider multiple if there becomes a need (users versus contributors/maintainers)Mailing lists - perhaps one targeted for users and another targeted for contributors/maintainers?
Discord Chat - important to strike a balance between too few and too many chat channels, link to Discord task force output
Public meetings - on a regular cadence. Ask community about best meeting time, consider two meetings to cover different regions, or rotating meeting times (shifted 8 hours or 12 hours)
- Finding new contributors and users
- Present at Meetups - Virtual or in person – these are well attended and the videos also get many views
- Email meetup@hyperledger.org if you're interested in presenting or join one of the bi-weekly Meetup and Workshop planning calls every other Thursday at 9:30 AM pacific
- Host technical Workshops - Virtual or in person (e.g. Global Forum) – these are well attended and the videos also get many views
- Reach out to one of the Hyperledger Community Architects or join one of the bi-weekly Meetup and Workshop planning calls every other Thursday at 9:30 AM pacific
- Take part in annual Mentorship program
- Near the beginning of each year maintainers have the option to submit projects to the annual Hyperledger mentorship program and work with mentees or code, documentation or research projects
- Other things to consider
- This doc has other ideas to consider to help you connect with more users and contributors: Raising the Profile of your Hyperledger Project or Lab
- Present at Meetups - Virtual or in person – these are well attended and the videos also get many views
Pull Requests
Quick
review turnarounds are appreciated and encourage future contributions (and shows up in Insight reports).
Equal attention to PRs - review in order of arrival as a general rule of thumb.
- 'Over'-communicate in PR comments, especially if review is delayed - contributors don't know what is in a maintainer's head
- Be gentle on new contributors, perhaps relax coding guidelines and fix up later
- Don't leave contributors hanging... if the contribution is not a good fit say so
- Mentor new contributors through the process, in PRs and otherwise
Contributing docs - examples:
- NOTE TODO - Perhaps common "contributing" content can be aggregated so that each project doesn't have to re-invent and re-document, or at least a common template.
Security - add link to security see also 2022 security task force
Named Provide named security contacts per project (at least two contacts)
Security Define security issue reporting process defined in SECURITY.md with reference to Hyperledger reporting process
- Review, respond, and act on reported security vulnerabilities
Follow security Security issue disclosure process - see task force https://github.com/hyperledger/toc/issues/48 Disclosure task force
Leverage automated scans, tooling depends on language but usually includes some combination of:
linters
Software Composition Analysis dependency scans, e.g. Dependabot, Govulncheck (depends on language) Govulncheck
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) aka static analysis scans, e.g. CodeQL, Snyk
Keep Pin dependencies and keep dependencies up to date (e, e.g. Dependabot)using Dependabot, although be wary of auto-upgrades and look for malware.
Engage with Hyperledger staff on possibility of security Security audits for Graduated project major releases, address audit results and socialize
Review OpenSSF secure developer guide and OpenSSF overview presentation to TOC (charts, replay)
Review and obtain OpenSSF Best Practices Badge - criteria
Sign release artifacts (TBD) - see proposed Security Artifact Signing - proposed task force - https://github.com/hyperledger/toc/issues/49
Documentation - add link to see Documentation task force and Onboarding task forcesforce
- Documentation should minimally target these audiences
User guide including Getting Started / Tutorial
Project developer guide including coding guidelines, design docs, build instructions, test instructions
Application developer guide
- Documentation task force will address Common styling guide, Recommended documentation platform?common publishing platform, Document best practices for creating documentation, etc.
Project management
- Maintain a written project roadmap, discuss in project meetings
- Create, clarify, and label issues in Github for contributors. Use Github default labels, e.g. "good first issue"
- Consider splitting "good first issue" label into multiple labels, e.g. "good-first-issue-100-introductory" through "good-first-issue-400-expert" (see Cacti project)
- Review, triage, comment on, and close inbound Github issues
Releases
Follow an established Release taxonomy - either SemVer or CalVer; use consistent pre-release tags (e.g. -preview, -alpha, -beta)
Document release strategy , and release process including required approvals
Document branch strategy, branch strategye.g. one branch per major.minor release works well so that it can be maintained in isolation while delivering major.minor.patch releases
Document Long-term support (LTS) release strategy - example https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric-rfcs/blob/main/text/0005-lts-release-strategy.md
- Use Github actions Actions to automate release process, e.g. publish artifacts and release notes upon drafting a GitHub release
- Use Reproducible builds
- Sign release commits with GPG (-S or --gpg-sign); sign release artifacts - see Security Artifact Signing task force
Release artifacts
binaries
attached to GitHub release
docker images
CI
- transition from Dockerhub to GitHub Packages? See data transfer and storage limits on GitHub Packages
- NPM packages - don't publish on every commit due to NPM limit of 1000 versions
Continuous Integration (CI)
GitHub Actions is the recommended CI platform, although use efficiently due to limits on number of runners, some ideas to limit runner usage:
- We are doing trials with BuildJet and faster GitHub runners (will report back)
- Use cancel-in-progress to suppress multiple jobs for multiple pushes to the same pull request
- Uncheck branch protection rule "Require branches to be up to date before merging" to reduce number of runs (potentially add a scheduled run if you are concerned about incompatible PRs getting merged)
- Use filters to eliminate unnecessary runs, e.g. doc PRs shouldn't require building and testing code.
- Consider running some jobs on schedule (nightly) rather than on each pull request (e.g. full matrix of platform tests)
- Inspect Github Actions run results on your own fork prior to opening Pull Request
Pull request checks
GitHub Actions recommended
Pull request checks
DCO
Unit tests
Integration tests
- Scans - see Security section, more comprehensive scans can be run nightly insteadconsider running on schedule (nightly) rather than on each pull request
- Be wary - just because a change passes checks doesn't mean it is necessarily good, it still requires judicious maintainer review
Test coverage reporting - run on-demand or nightly
- Keep CI clean and green at all times, address failures and flakes
See also proposed Automated Pipelines task force - https://github.com/hyperledger/toc/issues/44
GitHub configuration
Use Define repository settings in .github/settings.yml so that repository settings they can be managed and tracked via pull requests
Recommended initial repository settings, e.g. Repository options, Branch protection rules
Rebase merging is preferred over Merge commits and Squash merging to keep commit history clean (assuming contributors squash/amend their own pull requests), see Fabric example.
Define Branch protection rules (TODO - define best starting config)
- Add screenshot
- Reusable github actions
- Consider using a CODEOWNERS file to specify write permission per directory, see Fabric example with additional /docs maintainers.
- Add a link to maintainers.md scope field so that users can find domain area contacts
- Consider using a .github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md and .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE
GitHub workflow
Although there are often multiple paths to achieve an outcome in git and GitHub, there is value in defining a suggested path, both for the benefit of new GitHub users, and for the sake of project consistency.
- Rebase merging is preferred over Merge commits and Squash merging to keep commit history and PR description clean (assuming contributors squash/amend their own pull requests)
- Preserve commit hash - rebase then merge with fast forward option
- git rebase (branch); git merge --ff-only
- git commit -s versus git commit -S
- -S is crypto verified, -s is DCO signoff. Rebase preserves both.
- amend commits to avoid having multiple commits (
git commit --amend)
. If you do have multiple commits squash them before opening PR. Keep pull requests focused to a logical unit of work. - Mergify Examples - amending commits versus squashing commits, Mergifyio to simplify cherry picks and backports .-
@Mergifyio backport <branch>
- Example Fabric guidance doc for forking, branching, remotes, creating pull requests, updating pull requests, cherry picking
- TODO add this to Hyperledger TOC best practices site instead of buried in Fabric docs, add a link to Git-help Discord channel for git/github questions and discussions - https://hyperledger-fabric.readthedocs.io/en/latest/github/github.html