Submit your first pull request#

Follow these steps prior to submitting your first pull request to cloud-init:

Setup Git and GitHub appropriately#

Understanding how to use Git and GitHub is a prerequisite for contributing to cloud-init. Please refer to the GitHub quickstart documentation for more information.

Sign the CLA#

To contribute to cloud-init, you must first sign the Canonical contributor license agreement (CLA).

If you have already signed it as an individual, your Launchpad username will be listed in the contributor-agreement-canonical group. Unfortunately there is no easy way to check if the organisation or company you are working for has signed it.

When you sign:

  • ensure that you fill in the GitHub username field,

  • when prompted for a ‘Project contact’ or ‘Canonical Project Manager’, enter ‘James Falcon’.

If your company has signed the CLA for you, please contact us to help in verifying which Launchpad/GitHub accounts are associated with the company.

For any questions or help with the process, email James Falcon with the subject: “Cloud-init CLA”. You can also contact user falcojr in the #cloud-init channel on the Libera IRC network.

Add your name to the CLA signers list#

As part of your first PR to cloud-init, you should also add your GitHub username (alphabetically) to the in-repository list that we use to track CLA signatures: tools/.github-cla-signers.

PR #344 and PR #345 are good examples of what this should look like in your pull request, though please do not use a separate PR for this step.

Create a sandbox environment#

It is very often helpful to create a safe and sandboxed environment to test your changes in while you work. If you are not sure how to do this, check out our QEMU tutorial, which walks through this process step-by-step.

Format the code#

Apply the black and isort formatting rules with tox:

tox -e do_format

Run unit tests#

Run unit tests and lint/formatting checks with tox:

tox

Read our code review process#

Once you have submitted your PR (if not earlier!) you will want to read the cloud-init Code Review Process, so you can understand how your changes will end up in cloud-init’s codebase.