Contributing to Spark

Contributing to Spark

The Spark team welcomes contributions in the form of GitHub pull requests. Here are a few tips to get your contribution in:

• Break your work into small, single-purpose patches if possible. It's much harder to merge in a large change with a lot of disjoint features.
• Submit the patch as a GitHub pull request. For a tutorial, see the GitHub guides on forking a repo and sending a pull request.
• Follow the style of the existing codebase. Specifically, we use standard Scala style guide, but with the following changes:
  • Maximum line length of 100 characters.
  • Always import packages using absolute paths (e.g. scala.collection.Map instead of collection.Map).
  • No "infix" syntax for methods other than operators. For example, don't write table containsKey myKey; replace it with table.containsKey(myKey).
• Make sure that your code passes the unit tests. You can run the tests with sbt/sbt test in the root directory of Spark. But first, make sure that you have configured a spark-env.sh with at least SCALA_HOME, as some of the tests try to spawn subprocesses using this.
• Add new unit tests for your code. We use ScalaTest for testing. Just add a new Suite in core/src/test, or methods to an existing Suite.
• If you'd like to report a bug but don't have time to fix it, you can still post it to our issue tracker, or email the mailing list.

Git Branch Structure

Spark uses the master branch of the Git repo for the latest development code, and cuts out release branches (e.g. branch-0.5, branch-0.6 periodically that get stabilized and eventually become releases. Please send your patches and pull requests against master, unless you have a bug fix specific to one release branch. We will merge them into the appropriate releases too.

Licensing of Contributions

Contributions via GitHub pull requests are gladly accepted from their original author. Along with any pull requests, please state that the contribution is your original work and that you license the work to the project under the project's open source license. Whether or not you state this explicitly, by submitting any copyrighted material via pull request, email, or other means you agree to license the material under the project's open source license and warrant that you have the legal authority to do so.