The following are a set of guidelines for contributing to Milvus. Following these guidelines helps contributing to this project easy and transparent. These are mostly guideline, not rules. Use your best judgment, and feel free to propose changes to this document in a pull request.
1. To report a bug or a problem with documentation, please file an [issue](https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/issues/new/choose) providing the details of the problem. If you believe the issue needs priority attention, please comment on the issue to notify the team.
2. To propose a new feature, please file a new feature request [issue](https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/issues/new/choose). Describe the intended feature and discuss the design and implementation with the team and community. Once the team agrees that the plan looks good, go ahead and implement it, following the [Contributing code](CONTRIBUTING.md#contributing-code).
3. To implement a feature or bug-fix for an existing outstanding issue, follow the [Contributing code](CONTRIBUTING.md#contributing-code). If you need more context on a particular issue, comment on the issue to let people know.
If you have improvements to Milvus, send us your pull requests! For those just getting started, see [GitHub workflow](#github-workflow). Make sure to refer to the related issue in your pull request's comment and update [CHANGELOG.md](CHANGELOG.md).
The Milvus team members will review your pull requests, and once it is accepted, the status of the projects to which it is associated will be changed to **Reviewer approved**. This means we are working on submitting your pull request to the internal repository. After the change has been submitted internally, your pull request will be merged automatically on GitHub.
2. Clone your fork to your local machine with `git clone git@github.com:<yourname>/milvus-io/milvus.git`.
3. Create a branch with `git checkout -b my-topic-branch`.
4. Make your changes, commit, then push to to GitHub with `git push --set-upstream origin my-topic-branch`. You must record your changes in [CHANGELOG.md](CHANGELOG.md) with issue numbers and descriptions.
- Include unit tests when you contribute new features, as they help to prove that your code works correctly, and also guard against future breaking changes to lower the maintenance cost.
- Bug fixes also require unit tests, because the presence of bugs usually indicates insufficient test coverage.
- Keep API compatibility in mind when you change code in Milvus. Reviewers of your pull request will comment on any API compatibility issues.
- When you contribute a new feature to Milvus, the maintenance burden is (by default) transferred to the Milvus team. This means that the benefit of the contribution must be compared against the cost of maintaining the feature.
All contributions to this project must be accompanied by acknowledgment of, and agreement to, the [Developer Certificate of Origin](https://developercertificate.org/). Acknowledgment of and agreement to the Developer Certificate of Origin _must_ be included in the comment section of each contribution and _must_ take the form of `Signed-off-by: {{Full Name}} <{{email address}}>` (without the `{}`). Contributions without this acknowledgment will be required to add it before being accepted. If contributors are unable or unwilling to agree to the Developer Certificate of Origin, their contribution will not be included.
Contributors sign-off that they adhere to DCO by adding the following Signed-off-by line to commit messages:
```text
This is my commit message
Signed-off-by: Random J Developer <random@developer.example.org>
```
Git also has a `-s` command line option to append this automatically to your commit message: