Thanks to the hard work of the puppet-openstack
community, Puppet was the preferred method of deployment for Openstack
in the latest Openstack User Survey.

If you’d like to join in on the fun and contribute, read on !
 
First things first, a bit of context:

• Openstack is a modular cloud orchestration platform,
  self-described as “Open source software for building private and
  public clouds”.
• puppet-openstack is a Stackforge project that centralizes the
  development of puppet modules related to Openstack. puppet-openstack
  is also an actual module allowing the installation and
  configuration of core Openstack services.
• Stackforge is used to host Openstack-related projects so that they
  can benefit from the same continuous integration infrastructure and
  review system that the main Openstack projects use such as Nova.

Now that we have the basics out of the way, if you’d like to contribute
to Openstack in general, it’s not mandatory to have any programming or
networking knowledge. There’s always things like documentation and
translation that need manpower.

For contributing to puppet-openstack in particular, however, it is
required to be (or become!) familiar with ruby, puppet,
puppet-rspec and of course, Openstack..

The contribution process for puppet-openstack is slightly different than
committing code to primary Openstack projects (such as Nova) and I won’t
be highlighting them here for the sake of simplicity – this is a topic
for another blog post !

I recently started contributing as part of the
new puppet-ceph initiative so this blog post more or less describes
what I had to go through to get my first contribution in.

Okay, sign me up.

If you want to join in on the fun, the basic instructions for signing up
are pretty well documented on the Openstack
Wiki: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/How_To_Contribute

In a nutshell:

• Sign up a Launchpad account, this will be used to login to the
  Gerrit review system used by Openstack continuous integration:
  https://launchpad.net/+login
• Join the Openstack Foundation, this is free and required for
  contributing to Openstack: https://www.openstack.org/join/
• Agree to the Individual Contributor’s License Agreement (CLA)
• If you’re going to be comitting code on behalf of an organization,
  you’ll need to have a
  Corporate Contributor’s License Agreement (CCLA) in addition
  to the individual CLA.
• Start contributing !

Getting started

Let’s say I want to develop for puppet-ceph (!), I’ll keep these
resources handy:

• The Launchpad project for bugs/issues/fixes/feature/backlog
  documentation and
  discussion: https://bugs.launchpad.net/puppet-ceph (each project
  has it’s own launchpad project)
• The developer documentation will prove useful to prepare your
  development environment and beyond. For puppet modules,
  documentation is provided both on the Openstack
  Wiki and directly in the README files.

Clone the project

You’re going to need the puppet module source to work on it, you can
either clone it from Github:

git clone https://github.com/stackforge/puppet-ceph

or from Gerrit:

git clone https://review.openstack.org/stackforge/puppet-ceph

Make sure you have ruby, rubygems and bundle installed

First of all, you’ll need ruby and bundle to manage ruby
packages (gems).
These will be required, especially when the time will come to do
spec/integration/lint tests.

If you already have them you can skip this part !

On Ubuntu:

apt-get install ruby rubygems ruby-bundler

On Debian:

apt-get install ruby rubygems bundler

Install development dependencies

With the help of bundle, fetch and install the gem dependencies
documented in the Gemfile located at the root of the repository.

bundle install

Create your branch and do your stuff

Create a branch with a name relevant to what you’re doing

git checkout -b feature/my_feature

Now you can do your modifications.
Don’t forget to add new spec tests or modify existing ones to match the
modifications you made to the module.

Test your stuff

You’ve added or modified some code, now you want to test it:

Test for puppet syntax (puppet-lint):

bundle exec rake lint

Run spec tests (puppet-rspec)

bundle exec rake spec

If you try to push code that doesn’t pass the tests, jenkins will not
let you through – better make sure everything is okay before sending
something for review!

Tests are successful ? Add and commit your stuff

git add [file] git commit

Make sure your commit message follows the right format !

Send your stuff for review

git review

That’s it ! Your code was sent to gerrit for review by the community
and the core reviewers !

Jenkins or someone -1’d my code. Help !

Maybe you did a typo or something far worse you’d like to fix – this is
done by submitting another patch set.

Do the changes you want to do, add the files again but instead of using
‘git commit‘, use ‘git commit —amend‘.
This will essentially modify the initial commit.

After amending your commit, send the code back for a new review with
‘git review‘ once more.