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Contributing to QuestDB

Hi, glad to know that you're interested in contributing to QuestDB. Here are some topics that can help you to get started:

Bugs and features

Whether it's a bug report or feature request, you're welcome to raise an issue using the respective template.

If you're not sure whether you should raise an issue, you can also join our community Slack channel and post your questions there.

We aim to respond to your issues and questions soonest. If you wish to receive a faster response, we recommend you always describe your steps and provide information about your environment in the bug reports. And if you're proposing a new feature, it'll help us to evaluate the priority if you explain why you need it.

Navigation

Repository overview

Compiled binaries (for C libraries and Windows service wrapper) are committed to git to make build of development process Java-centric and simplified.

Finding suitable issues

Our maintainers label issues with relevant categories so you can use that to search for certain type of issues you'd like to work on. If you don't know where to start, try search for issues labeled with good first issue or help wanted. If you wish to understand how our maintainers work together, you can refer to this section.

Environment setup

Requirements

  • Operating system - x86-64: Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and OS X
  • Java 11 64-bit or later
  • Maven 3 (from your package manager on Linux / OSX (Homebrew) or from the jar for any OS)
  • C-compiler, CMake - to contribute to C libraries - OPTIONAL

Local environment

Setting up Java and JAVA_HOME

JAVA_HOME is required by Maven. It is possible to have multiple versions of Java on the same platform. Please set up JAVA_HOME to point to Java 11 or later. Other versions of Java may not work. If you are new to Java please check that JAVA_HOME is pointing to the root of Java directory: C:\Users\me\dev\jdk-11.0.8 and not C:\Users\me\dev\jdk-11.0.8\bin\java.

Linux/OS X

export JAVA_HOME="/path/to/java/"

Windows

set JAVA_HOME="c:\path\to\java directory"

Compiling Java and frontend code

You can compile the database and build the web console with the following command:

mvn clean package -DskipTests -P build-web-console

You can then run QuestDB with:

java -p core/target/questdb-<version>-SNAPSHOT.jar -m io.questdb/io.questdb.ServerMain -d <root_dir>

The web console will be available at localhost:9000.

Compiling C-libraries

C-libraries will have to be compiled for each platform separately. Cmake will also need JAVA_HOME to be set. The following commands will compile on Linux/OSX.

cd core
cmake -B build/release -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release .
cmake --build build/release --config Release

For more details, see CMake build instructions.

For C/С++ development we use CLion. This IDE "understands" cmake files and makes compilation easier.

The build will copy artifacts as follows:

core/src/main/c -> core/src/main/resources/io/questdb/bin

Local setup for frontend development

The frontend code (i.e. web console) is located in a separate repository. To set it up you should follow instructions provided in that repository.

The development environment for frontend can run on it's own, but will require QuestDB instance running in the background. You can achieve this in multiple ways:

  1. Run development version of QuestDB from this repository. Consult environment setup section of this document
  2. Run published QuestDB version, for example, with docker. More details can be found in the readme of this repository

Before you submit

Testing

We have a lot of tests, most of which are of "integration" type, e.g. test starts a server, interacts with it and asserts the outcome. We expect all contributors to submit PRs with tests. Please reach out to us via Slack if you're uncertain on how to test, or you think an existing test can be improved.

Dependencies

QuestDB does not have Java dependencies. This may sound unorthodox but in reality we try not to reinvent the wheel but rather than using libraries we implement algorithms on first principles to ensure perfect fit with existing code. With that in mind we expect contributions that do not add third-party dependencies.

Allocations, "new" operator and garbage collection

QuestDB is zero-GC along data pipelines. We expect contributions not to allocate if possible. That said we would like to help you to contribute zero-GC code, do not hesitate to reach out!

Committing

We use Conventional commits to auto-generate release notes. We require all commit comments to conform. To that end, commits have to be granular enough to be successfully described using this method.

FAQ

Why does the server work, but the UI returns a 404 on localhost:9000?

This means that the web console artifacts are not present in core/src/main/resources/io/questdb/site/public.zip. To fix this, you can simply run:

mvn clean package -DskipTests -P build-web-console

Why do some tests fail on Windows?

Some antivirus software may cause tests to fail. Typical indicators that antivirus is interfering with tests are that tests pass on CI but are failing in the following cases:

  • HTTP chunk size assertion (missing initial zeroes in e.g. IODispatcherTest)
  • Test timeout
  • JVM crash

In case of ESET products, the following steps may resolve the issue:

  • Disable "application protocol content filtering" explicitly or
  • Add 127.0.0.1 to "Excluded IP addresses" list in the advanced settings menu because disabling all top-level mechanisms doesn't turn protocol filtering off.

For maintainers

We have an engineering project board to help us organize pending GitHub issues among engineers across different timezones. And there are configured views for bug reports and feature requests respectively.

This is what you can do to organize open issues:

  • Add new issues to project board
  • Always assign yourself when you pick up an issue
  • Label the issues correctly after you assess them
  • Close the issue when no further action is required

Stages of our project board:

Stage Description
New When users reported a bug, await for someone to reproduce or follow up
More info needed When more communication with OP is required before we can begin triage
To do Once issues are confirmed and engineers can pick up. Order of items should imply the priority
In progress If an engineer picks up an issue, self-assign and move the issue to In progress stage
Done Once the linked pull request is merged, the issue is closed and moved to Done automatically

We also use labels to organize GitHub issues to have better overview. The current labels can be roughly categorized as below:

Categories Labels
Type Bug, New features, Enhancement, Test, Tidy up, Question, Performance, Java
Component ILP, Rest API, Postgres wire, SQL, Core, UI
Priority Immediate, Minor, Won't fix, Later
Difficulty Good first issue