Contributing to Beats
editContributing to Beats
editIf you have a bugfix or new feature that you would like to contribute, please start by opening a topic on the forums. It may be that somebody is already working on it, or that there are particular issues that you should know about before implementing the change.
We enjoy working with contributors to get their code accepted. There are many approaches to fixing a problem and it is important to find the best approach before writing too much code. After committing your code, check out the Elastic Contributor Program where you can earn points and rewards for your contributions.
The process for contributing to any of the Elastic repositories is similar.
Contribution Steps
edit- Please make sure you have signed our Contributor License Agreement. We are not asking you to assign copyright to us, but to give us the right to distribute your code without restriction. We ask this of all contributors in order to assure our users of the origin and continuing existence of the code. You only need to sign the CLA once.
- Send a pull request! Push your changes to your fork of the repository and submit a pull request using our pull request guidelines. New PRs go to the main branch. The Beats core team will backport your PR if it is necessary.
In the pull request, describe what your changes do and mention any bugs/issues related to the pull request. Please also add a changelog entry to CHANGELOG.next.asciidoc.
Setting Up Your Dev Environment
editThe Beats are Go programs, so install the 1.22.10 version of Go which is being used for Beats development.
After installing Go, set the
GOPATH environment variable to point to
your workspace location, and make sure $GOPATH/bin
is in your PATH.
One deterministic manner to install the proper Go version to work with Beats is to use the GVM Go version manager. An example for Mac users would be:
gvm use 1.22.10 eval $(gvm 1.22.10)
Then you can clone Beats git repository:
mkdir -p ${GOPATH}/src/github.com/elastic git clone https://github.com/elastic/beats ${GOPATH}/src/github.com/elastic/beats
If you have multiple go paths, use ${GOPATH%%:*}
instead of ${GOPATH}
.
Beats developers primarily use Mage for development. You can install mage using a make target:
make mage
Then you can compile a particular Beat by using Mage. For example, for Filebeat:
cd beats/filebeat mage build
You can list all available mage targets with:
mage -l
Some of the Beats might have extra development requirements, in which case you’ll find a CONTRIBUTING.md file in the Beat directory.
We use an EditorConfig file in the beats repository to standardise how different editors handle whitespace, line endings, and other coding styles in our files. Most popular editors have a plugin for EditorConfig and we strongly recommend that you install it.
Update scripts
editThe Beats use a variety of scripts based on Python, make and mage to generate configuration files and documentation. The primary command used for this is:
make update
Each Beat has its own update
target (for both make
and mage
), as well as a master update
in the repository root.
If a PR adds or removes a dependency, run make update
in the root beats
directory.
Another command properly formats go source files and adds a copyright header:
make fmt
Both of these commands should be run before submitting a PR. You can view all
the available make targets with make help
.
These commands have the following dependencies:
- Python >= 3.7
- Python venv module
- Mage
Python venv module is included in the standard library in Python 3. On Debian/Ubuntu
systems it also requires to install the python3-venv
package, that includes
additional support scripts:
sudo apt-get install python3-venv
Selecting Build Targets
editBeats is built using the make release
target. By default, make will select from a limited number of preset build targets:
- darwin/amd64
- darwin/arm64
- linux/amd64
- windows/amd64
You can change build targets using the PLATFORMS
environment variable. Targets set with the PLATFORMS
variable can either be a GOOS value, or a GOOS/arch pair.
For example, linux
and linux/amd64
are both valid targets. You can select multiple targets, and the PLATFORMS
list is space delimited, for example darwin windows
will build on all supported darwin and windows architectures.
In addition, you can add or remove from the list of build targets by prepending +
or -
to a given target. For example: +bsd
or -darwin
.
You can find the complete list of supported build targets with go tool dist list
.
Linting
editBeats uses golangci-lint. You can run the pre-configured linter against your change:
mage llc
llc
stands for Lint Last Change
which includes all the Go files that were changed in either the last commit (if you’re on the main
branch) or in a difference between your feature branch and the main
branch.
It’s expected that sometimes a contributor will be asked to fix linter issues unrelated to their contribution since the linter was introduced later than changes in some of the files.
You can also run the linter against an individual package, for example the filbeat command package:
golangci-lint run ./filebeat/cmd/...
Testing
editYou can run the whole testsuite with the following command:
make testsuite
Running the testsuite has the following requirements:
- Python >= 3.7
- Docker >= 1.12
- Docker-compose >= 1.11
For more details, refer to the Testing guide.
Documentation
editThe main documentation for each Beat is located under <beatname>/docs
and is
based on AsciiDoc. The Beats
documentation also makes extensive use of conditionals and content reuse to
ensure consistency and accuracy. Before contributing to the documentation, read
the following resources:
Dependencies
editIn order to create Beats we rely on Golang libraries and other external tools.
Other dependencies
editBesides Go libraries, we are using development tools to generate parsers for inputs and processors.
The following packages are required to run go generate
:
Auditbeat
edit- FlatBuffers >= 1.9
Filebeat
edit- Graphviz >= 2.43.0
- Ragel >= 6.10
Changelog
editTo keep up to date with changes to the official Beats for community developers, follow the developer changelog here.