In this blog post, I will show that contributing to Go language repositories is as simple as contributing to any other open-source repo. This will be a step-by-step guide on how to contribute to Go language repositories. For the example, I will use the main Go repo go.googlesource.com/go.
What we will contribute
I subscribed to Boldly Go: Daily for a year and recently got the following email:
It says that nobody cares about the grammar mistake in the sentence
The functions Alignof and Sizeof take an expression x of any type and return the alignment or size, respectively, of a hypothetical variable v as if v was declared via var v = x
in the Go language specification.
But I care. Let me fix it.
TL;DR. This CL fixes the grammar nit.
Contribution steps
There is an official Contribution Guide, but it’s too long and boring to read.
I am assuming you know how to contribute to a project on GitHub. If not, read this manual. I will only tell you about the specifics that apply to most Google software projects.
1. Sign in to Google CLA
First of all, we need to sign the Google Contributor License Agreements with a valid Google account at the Google CLA.
2. Configure Git authentication
Second, let’s configure authentication so we can push our changes to the Go repo. Log in to go Git repositories with a signed Google CLA account and click generate password.
Paste the generated script into a bash or zsh shell.
Now we are able to push to any of the repositories in Go Git.
3. Register to Gerrit
The communication during a review between people is handled on the Gerrit platform, so sign in with your Google Account. Gerrit is a little bit different from GitHub Pull Requests and weird at first look. But it’s more powerful and you will definitely like it in the future.
4. Clone the Go repo
We know that our spec is located in the go repository.
We should clone it locally to be able to make changes.
Gerrit requires git commits to have a special line like Change-Id: If4d3b3965762c8979d304a82493c9eb1068ee13c present.
We must install the git-codereview addon to automatically include this string.
On my machine, it takes around two minutes to fully clone the repo and install git-codereview with hooks:
$ git clone https://go.googlesource.com/go && (cd go && go install golang.org/x/review/git-codereview@latest && git-codereview hooks)
Cloning into 'go'...
remote: Sending approximately 431.23 MiB ...
remote: Counting objects: 22, done
remote: Total 639024 (delta 496556), reused 639024 (delta 496556)
Receiving objects: 100% (639024/639024), 431.04 MiB | 6.22 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (496556/496556), done.
Updating files: 100% (14130/14130), done.
go: downloading golang.org/x/review v1.13.0
5. Fix a typo
Open doc/go_spec.html in your favorite editor and finally fix the typo.
Create a commit in the branch spec-fix-typo with the following command:
$ git add . && git codereview change spec-fix-typo
git-codereview: created branch spec-fix-typo tracking origin/master.
git-codereview: change updated.
Think of the meaningful commit message.
You must follow git commit message conventions described here. In short, the template for a good commit message would be:
prefix: summary of changes
Optional multiline detailed description. There must be a blank line before.
Can be empty.
Where prefix is the name of the changed file or directory.
In our simple case, a good commit message would be a one-liner spec: fix grammar issue.
We can verify the commit with the special line Change-Id that gets created:
$ git log -1
commit c53307c3fdf1126eb6cdb1f09f4f9b83759be705 (HEAD -> spec-fix-typo)
Author: Oleksandr Redko <oleksandr.red+github@gmail.com>
Date: Fri Jan 10 17:00:24 2025 +0200
spec: fix grammar issue
Change-Id: If4d3b3965762c8979d304a82493c9eb1068ee13c
6. Wait for a review
Next, we should push our changes to Gerrit, so someone from the Go team can review them.
Instead of git push we use:
$ git codereview mail
Counting objects: 5, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 1.23 KiB | 1.23 MiB/s, done.
Total 3 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (2/2)
remote: Processing changes: new: 1, done
remote:
remote: New Changes:
remote: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/642037 spec: fix grammar issue
remote:
To https://go.googlesource.com/go
* [new branch] HEAD -> refs/for/master
We can open the link https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/642037 from the output in a browser to see the change.
After some time, usually from a couple of hours to a couple of weeks, someone will review our changes and approve them with +2.
You can read more about the review process.
Hurray! Now the Gopher Robot can merge it into the master.
We can see the fixed typo in the wild on the Go website.
Conclusion
Contributing to the Go repository is straightforward but does have some differences compared to contributing on GitHub. By following the outlined steps, you can successfully contribute to the Go project. While the process may seem a bit complex initially, it ensures that contributions are well-managed and maintain high standards. Everyone can contribute to Go, and it’s a simple process once you get the hang of it. Happy coding!