lix-installer/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to nix-installer

We're excited to see what you'd like to contribute to nix-installer!

Regardless of what (or how much) you contribute to nix-installer, we value your time and energy trying to improve the tool.

In order to ensure we all have a good experience, please review this document if you have any questions about the process.

Regular Rust committer? Contributing to nix-installer should feel similar to contributing to other serious Rust ecosystem projects. You may already know the process and expectations of you, this document shouldn't contain any surprises.

What kinds of contributions are needed?

Riff can benefit from all kinds of contributions:

• Bug reports
• Code improvements
• Registry additions
• Dependency updates or dependency feature trimming
• New features (Please create an issue first!)
• Documentation
• Graphical/visual asset improvement
• Kind words or recommendation on your own site, repo, stream, or social media account
• Onboarding others to using Riff

What are the expectations you can have of the maintainers?

You can expect us to:

• Follow the Contributor Covenant, just like you
• Help diagnose bug reports (for supported platforms using supported languages)
• Give constructive feedback on pull requests
• Merge pull requests which:
  • Have been approved of by at least 1 maintainer
  • Pass all tests
  • Have no complex conflicts with in-flight high priority work

The maintainers of this project use a separate issue tracker for some internal tasks. Unfortunately, the contents of this tracker is not publicly visible as it may contain sensitive or confidential data. Our maintainers will endeavor to ensure you are not 'left out' of the discussion about your contributions.

What kind of expectations do the maintainers have from you?

We expect you to:

• Follow the Contributor Covenant, just like them
• Make an earnest attempt to follow the contribution process described in this document
• Update bug reports with a solution, if you find one before we do
• Do your best to follow existing conventions
• Reflect maintainer feedback if you are able
• Declare if you need to abandon a PR so someone else can shepherd it

How exactly does the contribution process work?

Here are how to do various kinds of contributions.

Bug Reports

Create an issue on the issue page.

It should contain:

1. Your OS (Linux, Mac) and architecture (x86_64, aarch64)
2. Your nix-installer version (nix-installer --version)
3. The thing you tried to run (eg nix-installer)
4. What happened (the output of the command, please)
5. What you expected to happen
6. If you tried to fix it, what did you try?

Code/Documentation improvement

For minor fixes, documentation, or changes which do not have a tangible impact on user experience, feel free to open a pull request directly.

If the code improvement is not minor, such as new features or user facing changes, an issue proposing the change is required for non-maintainers.

Please:

• Write civil commit messages, it's ok if they are simple like fmt or formatting
• Follow existing conventions and style within the code the best you can
• Describe in your PR the problem and solution so reviewers don't need to rebuild much context
• Run nix flake check and nix build

Non-code contributions

Please open an issue to chat about your contribution and figure out how to best integrate it into the project.

Development

Some snippets or workflows for development.

Direnv support

While nix develop should work perfectly fine for development, contributors may prefer to enable direnv or nix-direnv support.

From the project folder:

direnv allow

If using an editor, it may be preferable to adopt an addon to enter the environment:

• vim
• VSCode

Testing Installs

If you're hacking on nix-installer, you likely already have Nix and cannot test locally.

That's probably a good thing! You should test in a sandbox.

Automated [qemu tests][#qemu-vm-tests] exist and should be preferred for oneshot testing of changes.

For interactive testing, tools like libvirt via virt-manager or vagrant can be used to spin up machines and run experiments.

When running such interactive tests, consider creating a snapshot of the VM right before running the installer, so you can quickly roll back if something happens.

In general, it's a good idea to test on the closest you can get to the desired target environment. For example, when testing the Steam Deck planner it's a good idea to run that test in a Steam Deck VM as described in detail in the planner.

Adding a planner for specific hardware?

Please include an full guide on how to create the best known virtual testing environment for that device.

A link is not sufficient, it may break. Please provide a full summary of steps to take, link to any original source and give them credit if it is appropriate.

It's perfectly fine if they are manual or labor intensive, as these should be a one time thing and get snapshotted prior to running tests.

qemu VM tests

In nix/tests/vm-test there exists some Nix derivations which we expose in the flake via hydraJobs.

These should be visible in nix flake show:

❯ nix flake show
warning: Git tree '/home/ana/git/determinatesystems/nix-installer' is dirty
git+file:///home/ana/git/determinatesystems/nix-installer
# ...
├───hydraJobs
│   └───vm-test
│       ├───all
│       │   └───x86_64-linux
│       │       └───install-default: derivation 'all'
│       ├───fedora-v36
│       │   └───x86_64-linux
│       │       └───install-default: derivation 'installer-test-fedora-v36-install-default'
│       ├───rhel-v7
│       │   └───x86_64-linux
│       │       └───install-default: derivation 'installer-test-rhel-v7-install-default'
│       ├───rhel-v8
│       │   └───x86_64-linux
│       │       └───install-default: derivation 'installer-test-rhel-v8-install-default'
│       ├───rhel-v9
│       │   └───x86_64-linux
│       │       └───install-default: derivation 'installer-test-rhel-v9-install-default'
│       └───ubuntu-v22_04
│           └───x86_64-linux
│               └───install-default: derivation 'installer-test-ubuntu-v22_04-install-default'

To run all of the currently supported tests:

nix build .#hydraJobs.vm-test.all.x86_64-linux.install-default -L

To run a specific distribution listed in the nix flake show output:

nix build .#hydraJobs.vm-test.rhel-v7.x86_64-linux.install-default -L

For PR review, you can also test arbitrary branches or checkouts like so:

nix build github:determinatesystems/nix-installer/${BRANCH}#hydraJobs.vm-test.ubuntu-v22_04.x86_64-linux.install-default -L

Adding a distro?

Notice how rhel-v7 has a v7, not just 7? That's so the test output shows correctly, as Nix will interpret the first -\d (eg -7, -123213) as a version, and not show it in the output.

Using v7 instead turns:

# ...
installer-test-rhel> Unpacking Vagrant box /nix/store/8maga4w267f77agb93inbg54whh5lxhn-libvirt.box...
installer-test-rhel> Vagrantfile
installer-test-rhel> box.img
installer-test-rhel> info.json
installer-test-rhel> metadata.json
installer-test-rhel> Formatting './disk.qcow2', fmt=qcow2 cluster_size=65536 extended_l2=off compression_type=zlib size=137438953472 backing_file=./box.img backing_fmt=qcow2 lazy_refcounts=off refcount_bits=16
# ...

Into this:

# ...
installer-test-rhel-v7-install-default> Unpacking Vagrant box /nix/store/8maga4w267f77agb93inbg54whh5lxhn-libvirt.box...
installer-test-rhel-v7-install-default> Vagrantfile
installer-test-rhel-v7-install-default> box.img
installer-test-rhel-v7-install-default> info.json
installer-test-rhel-v7-install-default> metadata.json
installer-test-rhel-v7-install-default> Formatting './disk.qcow2', fmt=qcow2 cluster_size=65536 extended_l2=off compression_type=zlib size=137438953472 backing_file=./box.img backing_fmt=qcow2 lazy_refcounts=off refcount_bits=16
# ...

Testing the action.yml

The action.yml is used directly in the CI process, so it is automatically tested for most changes.

If you are working on the action.yml There is an integration test for action.yml at https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer-example. You can create PRs there to prompt rebuilds, please refer to what you might be working on in the PR description so readers can easily find your work. (The commits don't have to be meaningful, git commit --allow-empty -m "prod at ci" is perfectly reasonable.)

Releases

nix-installer is still experimental, so this process may change.

To cut a release:

• Create a release branch from main (git checkout -b release-v0.0.1)
• Remove the -unreleased from the version field in Cargo.toml and flake.nix
• Push the branch, create a PR ("Release v0.0.1")
• Once the PR tests pass and it has been reviewed, merge it
• git pull on the main branch
• Tag the release (git tag v0.0.1)
• Push the tag (git push origin v0.0.1)
• The CI should produce artifacts via Buildkite and create a "Draft" release containing them on GitHub
  • This will take a bit, use this time to draft a changelog
• Review the draft release, test the artifacts in a VM
• Create a changelog following the format of last release
• Undraft the release
• Once you are certain the release is good, cargo publish it
  • Warning: While you can re-release Github releases, it is not possible to do the same on crates.io
• Create a PR bumping the version up one minor in the Cargo.toml and flake.nix, adding -unreleased at the end (v0.0.2-unreleased)

Who maintains nix-installer and why?

nix-installer is maintained by Determinate Systems in an effort to explore Nix installer ideas.

Determinate Systems has no plans to monetize or relicense nix-installer. If your enterprise requires a support contact in order to adopt a tool, please contact Determinate Systems and something can be worked out.