Notes for developers

Making life easy for others

Write useful commit messages.

If your commit is changing a specific module in the code and not touching other parts of the codebase (as should be the case 99% of the time), consider writing a useful commit message that also mentions which module was changed.

For example, a message like:

added foo

is not as clear as

crypto/keypair: Added foo method for Bar struct.

Also keep in mind that commit messages can be longer than a single line, so use it to your advantage to explain your commit and intentions.

cargo fmt pre-commit hook

To ensure every contributor uses the same code style, make sure you run cargo +nightly fmt before committing. You can force yourself to do this by creating a git pre-commit hook like the following:

#!/bin/sh
if ! cargo +nightly fmt -- --check >/dev/null; then
    echo "There are some code style issues. Run 'cargo +nightly fmt' to fix it."
    exit 1
fi

exit 0

Place this script in .git/hooks/pre-commit and make sure it's executable by running chmod +x .git/hooks/pre-commit.

Testing crate features

Our library heavily depends on cargo features. Currently there are more than 650 possible combinations of features to build the library. To ensure everything can always compile and works, we can use a helper for cargo called cargo hack.

The Makefile provided in the repository is already set up to use it, so it's enough to install cargo hack and run make check.