Contributing to RITA-Legacy

January 10, 2026 · View on GitHub

Want to help? We would love that!

Here are some ways to get involved, ranging in difficulty from easiest to hardest

Run the software and tell us when it breaks. We are happy to receive bug reports

Just be sure to do the following:

Check if the bug is already accounted for on the Github issue tracker
- If an issue already exists, add the relevant info in a comment
- If not, create an issue and include the relevant info
Give very specific descriptions of how to reproduce the bug
Include the output of rita-legacy --version
Include a description of your hardware (e.g. CPU, RAM, filesystems)
Tell us about the size of the test and the physical resources available

There are several ways to contribute code to the RITA-Legacy project. Before diving in, follow the Manual Installation Instructions

Work on bug fixes:
- Find an issue you would like to work on in the Github tracker, especially unassigned issues marked "good first issue"
- Leave a comment letting us know you would like to work on it
Add new features:
- If you would like to become involved in the development effort, open a new issue or continue a discussion on an existing issue

You must have a RITA-Legacy development environment set up and golangci-lint installed to run the tests.
Check the Makefile for all options. Currently you can run make test, make static-test, and make unit-test. There is also make integration-test and docker variants that will require you install docker as well.

Automated tests are run against each pull request. Build results may be viewed here.

In order to contribute to RITA-Legacy, you must fork it.
Once you have a forked repo you will need to clone it to a very specific path which corresponds to the original repo location. This is due to the way packages are imported in Go programs.
- git clone [your forked repo git url]
Add https://github.com/activecm/rita-legacy as a new remote so you can pull new changes.
- git remote add upstream https://github.com/activecm/rita-legacy
Split a branch off of main.
- git checkout -b [your new feature]
When your work is finished, pull the latest changes from the upstream main and rebase your changes on it.
- git checkout main; git pull -r upstream main
- git checkout [your new feature]; git rebase main
Push your commits to your repo and submit a pull request on Github.

Further info can be found in the Gittiquette doc under the guidelines and contributors sections.

Building RITA-Legacy using go build or go install yields a RITA-Legacy version of UNDEFINED
- Use make or make install instead