Contributing to HyperShift

Thank you for your interest in contributing to HyperShift! HyperShift enables running multiple OpenShift control planes as lightweight, cost-effective hosted clusters. Your contributions help improve this critical infrastructure technology.

The following guidelines will help ensure a smooth contribution process for both contributors and maintainers.

Prior to Submitting a Pull Request

1. Keep changes focused: Scope commits to one thing and keep them minimal. Separate refactoring from logic changes, and save additional improvements for separate PRs.

2. Test your changes: Run make pre-commit to update dependencies, build code, verify formatting, and run tests. This prevents CI failures on your PR.

3. Review before submitting: Look at your changes from a reviewer's perspective and explain anything that might not be immediately clear in your PR description.

4. Use proper commit format:

   1. Write commit subjects in imperative mood (e.g., "Fix bug" not "Fixed bug")
   2. Follow conventional commit format and include "Why" and "How" in commit messages

Creating a Pull Request

1. For small changes (under 200 lines): Create your change and submit a pull request directly.

2. For larger changes (200+ lines): Get feedback on your approach first by opening a GitHub issue or posting in the #project-hypershift Slack channel. This prevents situations where large changes get declined after significant work.

3. Write a clear PR title: Prefix with your Jira ticket number (e.g., "OCPBUGS-12345: Fix memory leak in controller"). See example PR.

4. Explain the value: Always describe how your change improves the project in the PR description.