Contributing to DNSControl

Thank you for your interest in contributing to DNSControl! This guide will help you get started.

Prerequisites

• Go 1.26+ (see go.mod for the exact version)
• golangci-lint (optional, used by CI and bin/generate-all.sh)
• staticcheck (optional, used by bin/generate-all.sh)

Building and testing

Build the binary:

go build .

Run all unit tests:

go test ./...

Run tests for a specific package:

go test ./pkg/spflib/

Run a single test:

go test ./pkg/spflib/ -run TestParseQualifiedMechanisms

Run the linter:

golangci-lint run

Before committing

Run bin/generate-all.sh from the repository root. This script handles formatting, code generation, linting, and keeping generated files in sync:

bin/generate-all.sh

It runs go fmt, go generate, go mod tidy, JSON formatting, and optionally golangci-lint and staticcheck if they are installed.

Commit message conventions

Prefix your commit message title with one of the following categories:

Prefix	Use for
FEATURE:	New functionality
BUG:	Bug fixes
DOCS:	Documentation changes
CHORE: or MAINT:	Maintenance, dependency updates
BUILD: or CICD:	CI/CD and build changes
REFACTOR:	Code refactoring
TEST:	Test additions or changes
PROVIDERNAME:	Provider-specific changes (e.g. CLOUDFLAREAPI:, ROUTE53:)

These prefixes are used by GoReleaser to categorize the release changelog. See .goreleaser.yml for the full list of recognized patterns.

Integration tests

Integration tests run real DNS operations against a provider's API. They require credentials and a dedicated test zone. See the integration test documentation for setup instructions.

go test ./integrationTest/ -v -args -provider PROVIDERNAME

Writing a new provider

See Writing new DNS providers for a step-by-step guide on implementing a new DNS provider.

Additional developer resources are available in the developer info section of the documentation.