Contribution Guide

• Contribution Guide
  • Before you get started
    • Code of Conduct
  • Your First Contribution
    • Code style
    • License Header
    • Find a good first topic
  • Setting up your development environment
    • Fork the project
    • Clone the project
    • New branch for a new code
    • Test
    • Commit and push
    • Create a Pull Request
    • Sign the CLA
    • Get a code review

Before you get started

Code of Conduct

Please make sure to read and observe our Code of Conduct.

Your First Contribution

Code style

• We follow Go Code Review
• At a minimum, use go fmt to format your code before committing. Ideally you should use trunk as our CI will run trunk on your code
• If you see any code which clearly violates the style guide, please fix it and send a pull request. No need to ask for permission
• Avoid unnecessary vertical spaces. Use your judgment or follow the code review comments
• Wrap your code and comments to 120 characters, unless doing so makes the code less legible

License Header

Every new source file must begin with a license header.

Most of Dgraph, Badger, and the Dgraph clients (dgo, dgraph-js, pydgraph and dgraph4j) are licensed under the Apache 2.0 license:

/*
 * SPDX-FileCopyrightText: © 2017-2026 Istari Digital, Inc.
 * SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0
 */

Find a good first topic

You can start by finding an existing issue with the good first issue or help wanted labels. These issues are well suited for new contributors.

Setting up your development environment

• Install Go 1.25.0 or above.
• Install trunk. Our CI uses trunk to lint and check code, having it installed locally will save you time.

Fork the project

• Visit https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger
• Click the Fork button (top right) to create a fork of the repository

Clone the project

git clone https://github.com/$GITHUB_USER/badger
cd badger
git remote add upstream git@github.com:dgraph-io/badger.git

# Never push to the upstream main
git remote set-url --push upstream no_push

New branch for a new code

Get your local main up to date:

git fetch upstream
git checkout main
git rebase upstream/main

Create a new branch from the main:

git checkout -b my_new_feature

And now you can finally add your changes to project.

Test

Build and run all tests:

./test.sh

Commit and push

Commit your changes:

git commit

When the changes are ready to review:

git push origin my_new_feature

Create a Pull Request

Just open https://github.com/$GITHUB_USER/badger/pull/new/my_new_feature and fill the PR description.

Sign the CLA

Click the Sign in with Github to agree button to sign the CLA. An example.

Get a code review

If your pull request (PR) is opened, it will be assigned to one or more reviewers. Those reviewers will do a code review.

To address review comments, you should commit the changes to the same branch of the PR on your fork.