How to Contribute

Using devcontainers

If you are using devcontainers and/or codespaces then you can start contributing immediately and skip the next step.

Formatting

Starlark files should be formatted by buildifier. We suggest using a pre-commit hook to automate this. First install pre-commit, then run

pre-commit install

Otherwise later tooling on CI will yell at you about formatting/linting violations.

Updating BUILD files

Some targets are generated from sources. Currently this is just the bzl_library targets. Run bazel run //:gazelle to keep them up-to-date.

Using this as a development dependency of other rules

You'll commonly find that you develop in another WORKSPACE, such as some other ruleset that depends on toolchains_protoc, or in a nested WORKSPACE in the integration_tests folder.

To always tell Bazel to use this directory rather than some release artifact or a version fetched from the internet, run this from this directory:

OVERRIDE="--override_repository=toolchains_protoc=$(pwd)/toolchains_protoc"
echo "common $OVERRIDE" >> ~/.bazelrc

This means that any usage of @toolchains_protoc on your system will point to this folder.

Releasing

  1. Determine the next release version, following semver (could automate in the future from changelog)
  2. Tag the repo and push it (or create a tag in GH UI)
  3. Watch the automation run on GitHub actions