Contributing

Thanks for considering a contribution! The following are multiple ways you could go about your contribution for which you can find further explanation further below:

  • Adding new checks

  • Add documentation or tutorials

  • Reporting bugs

When contributing any code make sure to run

  • flake8

  • mypy

  • black

on the code and ensure the documentation builds and the tests pass. A .pre-commit-config.yaml configuration file is available if you want to use git pre-commit hooks.

Setup

Before you can contribute any code, you will need to set up your development environment properly by following the instructions below.

  1. Fork Netlint. In GitHub, fork the Netlint repository to a new repository under your name. This will allow you to propose changes to the main Netlint repository through a pull request. For more information on how to do this, refer to GitHub’s documentation on how to fork a repository.

  2. Clone Netlint Fork. Clone your fork of the Netlint repository into your development environment. Refer to GitHub’s documentation on how to clone a repository.

  3. Install Poetry. Netlint utilizes Poetry for Python packaging and dependency management. In order to contribute code, you will need to follow Poetry’s installation instructions for your operating system of choice.

  4. Install Dependencies with Poetry. Use the poetry install command within the clone of your fork of the Netlint repository to install Netlint’s dependencies within your development environment.

Your development environment is now set up to contribute to Netlint!

Adding new checks

Right now the main thing that is missing is the implementation of various configuration checks. A good check must have the following properties:

Independence from state

A check has to work on just the textual configuration of the device. It may not depend on any state such as the operative status of an interface or the up/down status of a routing protocol neighbor.

Generality

A check must always be applicable to all of its assigned network operating systems (NOSes) regardless the context.

Usefulness

A check must always fulfill any of the following use cases:

  • Indicate redundant or unused configuration such as a feature that is enabled but never used or an access list that is configured but never applied

  • Indicate a security issue such as leaving telnet enabled

Write documentation or tutorials

The latest documentation is always present here. Take a look and see if you can find any typos, logical issues or unclear passages - contributions of any size are very welcome.

Reporting bugs

You can report issues here.