We'd love to accept your patches! Before we can take them, we
have to jump a couple of legal hurdles.
Please fill out either the individual or corporate Contributor License Agreement
(CLA).
Follow either of the two links above to access the appropriate CLA and
instructions for how to sign and return it. Once we receive it, we'll be able to
accept your pull requests.
If you are a Googler, you can either create an internal change or work on GitHub directly.
The Google Test community exists primarily through the
discussion group
and the GitHub repository.
Likewise, the Google Mock community exists primarily through their own
discussion group.
You are definitely encouraged to contribute to the
discussion and you can also help us to keep the effectiveness of the
group high by following and promoting the guidelines listed here.
Showing courtesy and respect to others is a vital part of the Google
culture, and we strongly encourage everyone participating in Google
Test development to join us in accepting nothing less. Of course,
being courteous is not the same as failing to constructively disagree
with each other, but it does mean that we should be respectful of each
other when enumerating the 42 technical reasons that a particular
proposal may not be the best choice. There's never a reason to be
antagonistic or dismissive toward anyone who is sincerely trying to
contribute to a discussion.
Sure, C++ testing is serious business and all that, but it's also
a lot of fun. Let's keep it that way. Let's strive to be one of the
friendliest communities in all of open source.
As always, discuss Google Test in the official GoogleTest discussion group.
You don't have to actually submit code in order to sign up. Your participation
itself is a valuable contribution.
To keep the source consistent, readable, diffable and easy to merge,
we use a fairly rigid coding style, as defined by the google-styleguide project. All patches will be expected
to conform to the style outlined here.
Use .clang-format to check your formatting
If you plan to contribute a patch, you need to build Google Test,
Google Mock, and their own tests from a git checkout, which has
further requirements:
This section discusses how to make your own changes to Google Test.
To make sure your changes work as intended and don't break existing
functionality, you'll want to compile and run Google Test's own tests.
For that you can use CMake:
mkdir mybuild
cd mybuild
cmake -Dgtest_build_tests=ON ${GTEST_DIR}
Make sure you have Python installed, as some of Google Test's tests
are written in Python. If the cmake command complains about not being
able to find Python (Could NOT find PythonInterp (missing: PYTHON_EXECUTABLE)), try telling it explicitly where your Python
executable can be found:
cmake -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=path/to/python -Dgtest_build_tests=ON ${GTEST_DIR}
Next, you can build Google Test and all of its own tests. On *nix,
this is usually done by 'make'. To run the tests, do
make test
All tests should pass.
Some of Google Test's source files are generated from templates (not
in the C++ sense) using a script.
For example, the
file include/gtest/internal/gtest-type-util.h.pump is used to generate
gtest-type-util.h in the same directory.
You don't need to worry about regenerating the source files
unless you need to modify them. You would then modify the
corresponding .pump files and run the 'pump.py'
generator script. See the Pump Manual.
This section discusses how to make your own changes to Google Mock.
To make sure your changes work as intended and don't break existing
functionality, you'll want to compile and run Google Test's own tests.
For that you'll need Autotools. First, make sure you have followed
the instructions above to configure Google Mock.
Then, create a build output directory and enter it. Next,
${GMOCK_DIR}/configure # try --help for more info
Once you have successfully configured Google Mock, the build steps are
standard for GNU-style OSS packages.
make # Standard makefile following GNU conventions
make check # Builds and runs all tests - all should pass.
Note that when building your project against Google Mock, you are building
against Google Test as well. There is no need to configure Google Test
separately.