Contributing to Lighthouse

Lighthouse welcomes contributions. If you are interested in contributing to the Ethereum ecosystem, and you want to learn Rust, Lighthouse is a great project to work on.

To start contributing,

Read our how to contribute document.
Setup a development environment.
Browse through the open issues (tip: look for the good first issue tag).
Comment on an issue before starting work.
Share your work via a pull-request.

If you have questions, please reach out via Discord.

Branches

Lighthouse maintains two permanent branches:

stable: Always points to the latest stable release.
- This is ideal for most users.
unstable: Used for development, contains the latest PRs.
- Developers should base their PRs on this branch.

Ethereum consensus client

Lighthouse is an implementation of the Ethereum proof-of-stake consensus specification, as defined in the ethereum/consensus-specs repository.

We recommend reading Danny Ryan's (incomplete) Phase 0 for Humans before diving into the canonical spec.

Rust

Lighthouse adheres to Rust code conventions as outlined in the Rust Styleguide.

Please use clippy and rustfmt to detect common mistakes and inconsistent code formatting:

$ cargo clippy --all
$ cargo fmt --all --check

Generally, panics should be avoided at all costs. Lighthouse operates in an adversarial environment (the Internet) and it's a severe vulnerability if people on the Internet can cause Lighthouse to crash via a panic.

Always prefer returning a Result or Option over causing a panic. For example, prefer array.get(1)? over array[1].

If you know there won't be a panic but can't express that to the compiler, use .expect("Helpful message") instead of .unwrap(). Always provide detailed reasoning in a nearby comment when making assumptions about panics.

TODOs

All TODO statements should be accompanied by a GitHub issue.

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
pub fn my_function(&mut self, _something &[u8]) -> Result<String, Error> {
  // TODO: something_here
  // https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse/issues/XX
}
}

Comments

General Comments

Prefer line (//) comments to block comments (/* ... */)
Comments can appear on the line prior to the item or after a trailing space.

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
// Comment for this struct
struct Lighthouse {}
fn make_blockchain() {} // A comment on the same line after a space
}

Doc Comments

The /// is used to generate comments for Docs.
The comments should come before attributes.

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
/// Stores the core configuration for this Lighthouse instance.
/// This struct is general, other components may implement more
/// specialized config structs.
#[derive(Clone)]
pub struct LighthouseConfig {
    pub data_dir: PathBuf,
    pub p2p_listen_port: u16,
}
}

Rust Resources

Rust is an extremely powerful, low-level programming language that provides freedom and performance to create powerful projects. The Rust Book provides insight into the Rust language and some of the coding style to follow (As well as acting as a great introduction and tutorial for the language).

Rust has a steep learning curve, but there are many resources to help. We suggest:

Lighthouse Book