Contributing to Beats

If you have a bugfix or new feature that you would like to contribute, please start by opening a topic on the forums. It may be that somebody is already working on it, or that there are particular issues that you should know about before implementing the change.

We enjoy working with contributors to get their code accepted. There are many approaches to fixing a problem and it is important to find the best approach before writing too much code.

The process for contributing to any of the Elastic repositories is similar.

If you want to create a new Beat, please read Creating a New Beat. You don’t need to submit the code to this repository. Most new Beats start in their own repository and just make use of the libbeat packages. After you have a working Beat that you’d like to share with others, open a PR to add it to our list of community Beats.

The Beats are Go programs, so install the 1.12.4 version of Go which is being used for Beats development.

After installing Go, set the GOPATH environment variable to point to your workspace location, and make sure $GOPATH/bin is in your PATH.

The location where you clone is important. Make a directory structure under GOPATH that matches the URL used for Elastic repositories, then clone the beats repository under the new directory:

mkdir -p ${GOPATH}/src/github.com/elastic
git clone https://github.com/elastic/beats ${GOPATH}/src/github.com/elastic/beats

Then you can compile a particular Beat by using the Makefile. For example, for Packetbeat:

cd beats/packetbeat
make

Some of the Beats might have extra development requirements, in which case you’ll find a CONTRIBUTING.md file in the Beat directory.

We use an EditorConfig file in the beats repository to standardise how different editors handle whitespace, line endings, and other coding styles in our files. Most popular editors have a plugin for EditorConfig and we strongly recommend that you install it.

The Beats use a variety of scripts based on Python to generate configuration files and documentation. The primary command used for this is:

make update

Another command properly formats go source files and adds a copyright header:

make fmt

These commands have the following dependencies:

Virtualenv can be installed with the command easy_install virtualenv or pip install virtualenv. More details can be found here. Both of these commands should be run before submitting a PR. You can view all the available make targets with make help.

Beats is built using the make release target. By default, make will select from a limited number of preset build targets:

You can change build targets using the PLATFORMS environment variable. Targets set with the PLATFORMS variable can either be a GOOS value, or a GOOS/arch pair. For example, linux and linux/amd64 are both valid targets. You can select multiple targets, and the PLATFORMS list is space delimited, for example darwin windows will build on all supported darwin and windows architectures. In addition, you can add or remove from the list of build targets by prepending + or - to a given target. For example: +bsd or -darwin.

You can find the complete list of supported build targets with go tool dist list.

You can run the whole testsuite with the following command:

make testsuite

Running the testsuite has the following requirements:

For more details check the Testing guide.

The documentation for each Beat is located under {beatname}/docs and is based on asciidoc. After changing the docs, you should verify that the docs are still building to avoid breaking the automated docs build. To build the docs run make docs. If you want to preview the docs for a specific Beat, run make docs-preview inside the folder for the Beat. This will automatically open your browser with the docs for preview.

To manage the vendor/ folder we use govendor. Please see the govendor documentation on how to add or update vendored dependencies.

In most cases govendor fetch your/dependency@version +out will get the job done.

To keep up to date with changes to the official Beats for community developers, follow the developer changelog here.