AdGuardHome/HACKING.md

AdGuardHome Developer Guidelines

As of 2020-11-27, this document is a work-in-progress, but should still be followed. Some of the rules aren't enforced as thoroughly or remain broken in old code, but this is still the place to find out about what we want our code to look like.

The rules are mostly sorted in the alphabetical order.

Git

• Call your branches either NNNN-fix-foo (where NNNN is the ID of the GitHub issue you worked on in this branch) or just fix-foo if there was no GitHub issue.

• Follow the commit message header format:

  pkg: fix the network error logging issue
  

  Where pkg is the package where most changes took place. If there are several such packages, or the change is top-level only, write all.

• Keep your commit messages, including headers, to eighty (80) columns.

• Only use lowercase letters in your commit message headers. The rest of the message should follow the plain text conventions below.

  The only exceptions are direct mentions of identifiers from the source code and filenames like HACKING.md.

Go

Code And Naming

• Avoid goto.

• Avoid init and use explicit initialization functions instead.

• Avoid new, especially with structs.

• Constructors should validate their arguments and return meaningful errors. As a corollary, avoid lazy initialization.

• Don't use naked returns.

• Don't use underscores in file and package names, unless they're build tags or for tests. This is to prevent accidental build errors with weird tags.

• Don't write code with more than four (4) levels of indentation. Just like Linus said, plus an additional level for an occasional error check or struct initialization.

• Eschew external dependencies, including transitive, unless absolutely necessary.

• Name benchmarks and tests using the same convention as examples. For example:

  func TestFunction(t *testing.T) { /* … */ }
  func TestFunction_suffix(t *testing.T) { /* … */ }
  func TestType_Method(t *testing.T) { /* … */ }
  func TestType_Method_suffix(t *testing.T) { /* … */ }
  

• Name the deferred errors (e.g. when closing something) cerr.

• No shadowing, since it can often lead to subtle bugs, especially with errors.

• Prefer constants to variables where possible. Reduce global variables. Use constant errors instead of errors.New.

• Use linters.

• Use named returns to improve readability of function signatures.

• Write logs and error messages in lowercase only to make it easier to grep logs and error messages without using the -i flag.

Commenting

• See also the Text, Including Comments section below.

• Document everything, including unexported top-level identifiers, to build a habit of writing documentation.

• Don't put identifiers into any kind of quotes.

• Put comments above the documented entity, not to the side, to improve readability.

• When a method implements an interface, start the doc comment with the standard template:

  // Foo implements the Fooer interface for *foo.
  func (f *foo) Foo() {
      // …
  }
  

Formatting

• Add an empty line before break, continue, fallthrough, and return, unless it's the only statement in that block.

• Use gofumpt --extra -s.

  TODO(a.garipov): Add to the linters.

• Write slices of struct like this:

  ts := []T{{
          Field: Value0,
          // …
  }, {
          Field: Value1,
          // …
  }, {
          Field: Value2,
          // …
  }}
  

Recommended Reading

• https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/CodeReviewComments.

• https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/TestComments.

• https://go-proverbs.github.io/

Markdown

• TODO(a.garipov): Define our Markdown conventions.

Text, Including Comments

• End sentences with appropriate punctuation.

• Headers should be written with all initial letters capitalized, except for references to variable names that start with a lowercase letter.

• Start sentences with a capital letter, unless the first word is a reference to a variable name that starts with a lowercase letter.

• Text should wrap at eighty (80) columns to be more readable, to use a common standard, and to allow editing or diffing side-by-side without wrapping.

  The only exception are long hyperlinks.

• Use U.S. English, as it is the most widely used variety of English in the code right now as well as generally.

• Use double spacing between sentences to make sentence borders more clear.

• Use the serial comma (a.k.a. Oxford comma) to improve comprehension, decrease ambiguity, and use a common standard.

• Write todos like this:

  // TODO(usr1): Fix the frobulation issue.
  

  Or, if several people need to look at the code:

  // TODO(usr1, usr2): Fix the frobulation issue.
  

YAML

• TODO(a.garipov): Define naming conventions for schema names in our OpenAPI YAML file. And just generally OpenAPI conventions.

• TODO(a.garipov): Find a YAML formatter or write our own.

• All strings, including keys, must be quoted. Reason: the NO-rway Law.

• Indent with two (2) spaces. YAML documents can get pretty deeply-nested.

• No extra indentation in multiline arrays:

  'values':
  - 'value-1'
  - 'value-2'
  - 'value-3'
  

• Prefer single quotes for strings to prevent accidental escaping, unless escaping is required or there are single quotes inside the string (e.g. for GitHub Actions).

• Use > for multiline strings, unless you need to keep the line breaks.