certificates/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to step certificates

We welcome contributions to step certificates of any kind including documentation, themes, organization, tutorials, blog posts, bug reports, issues, feature requests, feature implementations, pull requests, helping to manage issues, etc.

Table of Contents

• Contributing to step certificates
  • Table of Contents
  • Building From Source
    • Build a standard step-ca
    • Build step-ca using CGO
      • The CGO build enables PKCS #11 and YubiKey PIV support
      • 1. Install PCSC support
      • 2. Build step-ca
  • Asking Support Questions
  • Reporting Issues
  • Code Contribution
  • Submitting Patches
    • Code Contribution Guidelines
    • Git Commit Message Guidelines

Building From Source

Clone this repository to get a bleeding-edge build, or download the source archive for the latest stable release.

Build a standard step-ca

The only prerequisites are go and make.

To build from source:

make bootstrap && make

Find your binaries in bin/.

Build step-ca using CGO

The CGO build enables PKCS #11 and YubiKey PIV support

To build the CGO version of step-ca, you will need go, make, and a C compiler.

You'll also need PCSC support on your operating system, as required by the go-piv module. On Linux, the libpcsclite-dev package provides PCSC support. On macOS and Windows, PCSC support is built into the OS.

1. Install PCSC support

On Debian-based distributions, run:

sudo apt-get install libpcsclite-dev

On Fedora:

sudo yum install pcsc-lite-devel

On CentOS:

sudo yum install 'dnf-command(config-manager)'
sudo yum config-manager --set-enabled PowerTools
sudo yum install pcsc-lite-devel

2. Build step-ca

To build step-ca, clone this repository and run the following:

make bootstrap && make build GO_ENVS="CGO_ENABLED=1"

When the build is complete, you will find binaries in bin/.

Asking Support Questions

Feel free to post a question on our GitHub Discussions page, or find us on Discord.

Reporting Issues

If you believe you have found a defect in step certificates or its documentation, use the GitHub issue tracker to report the problem. When reporting the issue, please provide the version of step certificates in use (step-ca version) and your operating system.

Code Contribution

step certificates aims to become a fully featured online Certificate Authority. We encourage all contributions that meet the following criteria:

• fit naturally into a Certificate Authority.
• strive not to break existing functionality.
• close or update an open step certificates issue

Bug fixes are, of course, always welcome.

Submitting Patches

step certificates welcomes all contributors and contributions. If you are interested in helping with the project, please reach out to us or, better yet, submit a PR :).

Code Contribution Guidelines

Because we want to create the best possible product for our users and the best contribution experience for our developers, we have a set of guidelines which ensure that all contributions are acceptable. The guidelines are not intended as a filter or barrier to participation. If you are unfamiliar with the contribution process, the Smallstep team will guide you in order to get your contribution in accordance with the guidelines.

To make the contribution process as seamless as possible, we ask for the following:

• Go ahead and fork the project and make your changes. We encourage pull requests to allow for review and discussion of code changes.
• When you’re ready to create a pull request, be sure to:
  • Sign the CLA.
  • Have test cases for the new code. If you have questions about how to do this, please ask in your pull request.
  • Run go fmt.
  • Add documentation if you are adding new features or changing functionality.
  • Squash your commits into a single commit. git rebase -i. It’s okay to force update your pull request with git push -f.
  • Follow the Git Commit Message Guidelines below.

Git Commit Message Guidelines

This blog article is a good resource for learning how to write good commit messages, the most important part being that each commit message should have a title/subject in imperative mood starting with a capital letter and no trailing period: "Return error on wrong use of the Paginator", NOT "returning some error."

Also, if your commit references one or more GitHub issues, always end your commit message body with See #1234 or Fixes #1234. Replace 1234 with the GitHub issue ID. The last example will close the issue when the commit is merged into master.

Please use a short and descriptive branch name, e.g. NOT "patch-1". It's very common but creates a naming conflict each time when a submission is pulled for a review.

An example:

Add step certificate install

Add a command line utility for installing (and uninstalling) certificates to the
local system truststores. This should help developers with local development
flows.

Fixes #75