CONTRIBUTING_GUIDELINES.md
We'd love your help!
Jaeger is Apache 2.0 licensed and accepts contributions via GitHub pull requests. This document outlines some of the conventions on development workflow, commit message formatting, contact points and other resources to make it easier to get your contribution accepted.
We gratefully welcome improvements to documentation as well as to code.
Table of Contents:
Before making any significant changes, please open an issue. Each issue should describe the following:
Discussing your proposed changes ahead of time will make the contribution process smooth for everyone. Once the approach is agreed upon, make your changes and open a pull request (PR).
We do not assign issues to contributors. It is almost never the case that multiple people jump on the same issue, and practice showed that occasionally people who ask for an issue to be assigned to them later have a change in priorities and are unable to find time to finish it, which leaves the issue in limbo. So if you have a desire to work on an issue, feel free to mention it in the comment and just submit a PR.
If you are new to GitHub's contribution workflow, we recommend the following setup:
git remote -v
origin, e.g. origin [email protected]:{username}/jaeger.gitupstream remote:
git remote add upstream [email protected]:jaegertracing/jaeger.git
git fetch upstream main
git branch --set-upstream-to=upstream/main main
Once you're ready to make changes:
main, it will cause CI errors).git commit -s -m "Your commit message"
git push --set-upstream origin {branch-name}
Each PR should have:
Resolves #123.This policy exists to:
To ensure high-quality code reviews and long-term codebase stability, we limit the number of simultaneous open PRs for new contributors.
Your limit of simultaneous open PRs is based on your history with this project:
| Merged PRs in this project | Max Simultaneous Open PRs |
|---|---|
| 0 (First-time contributor) | 1 |
| 1 merged PR | 2 |
| 2 merged PRs | 3 |
| 3+ merged PRs | Unlimited |
AI tools have dramatically reduced the cost of creating pull requests, but the burden on maintainers for reviewing them remains the same. Large-scale or complex refactors require significant effort to review, and a high volume of PRs from new contributors often leads to:
If you reach your limit, please focus on addressing feedback and merging your existing PR(s) before opening new ones. PRs opened in excess of these limits may be labeled as on-hold or closed to keep our backlog manageable.
By contributing your code, you agree to license your contribution under the terms of the Apache License.
If you are adding a new file it should have a header like below. In some
languages, e.g. Python, you may need to change the comments to start with #.
The easiest way is to copy the header from one of the existing source files and
make sure the year is current and the copyright says "The Jaeger Authors".
// Copyright (c) 2026 The Jaeger Authors.
// SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0
Never remove existing copyright headers.
Some files may have other copyright headers, such as:
// Copyright (c) 2017 Uber Technologies, Inc.
If you are modifying such a file you may add Jaeger copyright on top:
// Copyright (c) 2026 The Jaeger Authors.
// Copyright (c) 2017 Uber Technologies, Inc.
By contributing to this project you agree to the Developer Certificate of Origin (or simply DCO). This document was created by the Linux Kernel community and is a simple statement that you, as a contributor, have the legal right to make the contribution.
The sign-off is a simple line at the end of the explanation for the patch, which certifies that you wrote it or otherwise have the right to pass it on as an open-source patch. The rules are pretty simple: if you can certify the conditions in the DCO, then just add a line to every git commit message:
Signed-off-by: Bender Bending Rodriguez <[email protected]>
using your real name (sorry, no pseudonyms or anonymous contributions.) You can
add the sign off when creating the git commit via git commit -s.
Note that every commit in the pull request must be signed. Jaeger repositories are configured with a DCO-bot that will check sign-offs on every commit and block the PR from being merged if some commits are missing sign-offs. If you only have one commit or the latest commit in the PR is missing a sign-off, the simplest way to fix this is to run:
git commit --amend -s
which will prompt you to edit the commit message while adding a signature. Simply accept the text as is, and push the branch:
git push --force
If some commit in the middle of your commit history is missing the sign-off, the simplest solution is to squash the commits into one and sign it. For example, suppose that your branch history looks like this:
fe43631 - Fix HotROD Docker command
933efb3 - Add files for ingester
214c133 - Rename gas to gosec
0a40309 - Update Makefile build_ui target to lerna structure
7919cd9 - Add support for Cassandra reconnect interval
a0dc40e - Fix deploy step
77a0573 - (tag: v1.6.0) Prepare release 1.6.0
Let's assume that the first commit 77a0573 was the commit before you started
work on your PR, and commits from a0dc40e to fe43631 are your changes that
you want to squash. You can run the soft reset command:
git reset --soft 77a0573
It will undo all changes after commit 77a0573 and stage them. You can commit
them all at once while adding the signature:
git commit -s -m 'your commit message, e.g. the PR title'
Then push the branch:
git push --force
Before submitting a PR make sure to create a named branch in your forked repository. Our CI will fail if you submit a PR from the main branch. If that happens, just create a new branch and re-submit the PR from that branch.