Contributor's Guide

Ghidra is an open source project. If you are interested in making it better, there are many ways you can contribute. For example, you can:

• Submit a bug report
• Suggest a new feature
• Provide feedback by commenting on feature requests/proposals
• Propose a patch by submitting a pull request
• Suggest or submit documentation improvements
• Review outstanding pull requests
• Answer questions from other users
• Share the software with other users who are interested
• Teach others to use the software

Bugs and Feature Requests

If you believe that you have found a bug or wish to propose a new feature, please first search the existing issues to see if it has already been reported. If you are unable to find an existing issue, consider using one of the provided templates to create a new issue and provide as many details as you can to assist in reproducing the bug or explaining your proposed feature.

Patch Submission Tips

Patches should be submitted in the form of Pull Requests to the Ghidra repository on GitHub. But first, consider the following tips to ensure a smooth process when submitting a patch:

• Before you begin implementing, consider first opening a dialogue with the Ghidra team to ensure that your efforts will align with the goals of the project. This may provide you with valuable insight on what the best design and implementation strategy is, inform you about what internal efforts may already be underway, and will significantly improve the odds that your patch gets accepted. Unsolicited pull requests will likely receive an initial lower priority from the Ghidra team due to our massive backlog.

• Focus your patches on bug fixes that were discovered through real-world usage and testing, and on improvements that clearly satisfy a need in Ghidra's functionality.

• Please do not create an issue that is effectively a duplicate of your pull request. Instead, fully describe the bug in the pull request/patch description text box.

• If using "AI" to assist in development, please apply extra scrutiny to its suggestions, in terms of both correctness and adherence to our legal requirements. Do not include an Architecture Decision Record (ADR) with your pull request. AI-generated unit tests should only be included with your pull request if they add coverage to an existing test file and make architectual sense to be there. When in doubt, do not include unit tests in your pull request unless a Ghidra team member asks you to during the review process.

• Follow the Ghidra Coding Standards.

• Limit your patches to the smallest reasonable change to achieve your intended goal. For example, do not make unnecessary indentation changes; but don't go out of your way to make the patch so minimal that it isn't easy to read, either. Consider the reviewer's perspective.

• Isolate multiple patches from each other. If you wish to make several independent patches, do so in separate, smaller pull requests that can be reviewed more easily.

• Unless previously authorized by the Ghidra team, repackaging, renaming, and other refactoring should not be part of any pull request. These types of changes are difficult to review, pollute the git history making it harder to do git forensics on regressions, and will likely conflict with other changes that the Ghidra team is making internally.

• Avoid "find and replace" changes in your pull request. While it may be tempting to globally replace calls to deprecated methods or change the style of the code to fit your personal preference, these types of seemingly trivial changes have likely not already been performed by the Ghidra team for good reason.

• Avoid pull requests that update jars or other 3rd party libraries. It is preferred that these changes are made internally by the team. If you have a need for an updated library, please submit an issue with your request instead of a pull request.

• Avoid submitting self-generated binary files as part of your pull request. Despite your best intentions, our policy forbids accepting them because we cannot effectively review and validate their content.

• Ensure that the patch compiles and runs in at least our development environment, and ideally our full build too. Even the most trivial change done in the GitHub editor has a chance to cause problems in the full development environment for unexpected reasons.

• Before submission, please squash your commits down to a single commit that briefly describes the changes.

• Please do not include the issue number that is being fixed in the pull request/patch title field. Instead, use "Fixes #xxx" somewhere in the pull request/patch description text box.

• Pull request/patch title or commit message lines must not begin with # since it leads to unrecognized lines while squashing.

• Be understanding, patient, and friendly; developers may need time to review your submissions before they can take action or respond. This does not mean your contribution is not valued. If your contribution has not received a response in a reasonable time, consider commenting with a polite inquiry for an update.

• Be prepared to answer questions from reviewers. They may have further questions before accepting your patch, and may even propose changes. Please accept this feedback constructively, and not as a rejection of your proposed change.

• If you want to update your pull request branch with the latest commits to master, please rebase your branch onto master, rather than merging it into your branch. Then, force-push your rebased branch. Note that a simple push will fail after a rebase, it has to be a "force-push".

Review

• We welcome code reviews from anyone. A committer is required to formally accept and merge the changes.

• Reviewers will be looking for things like threading issues, performance implications, API design, duplication of existing functionality, readability and code style, avoidance of bloat (scope-creep), etc.

• Reviewers will likely ask questions to better understand your change.

• Reviewers will make comments about changes to your patch:

  • MUST means that the change is required
  • SHOULD means that the change is suggested, further discussion on the subject may be required
  • COULD means that the change is optional

Getting Started

Once available, please see the README and Developer's Guide for instructions to set up a suitable development environment.

Timeline and Managing Expectations

As we continue to engage contributors and learn best practices for running a successful open source project, our processes and guidance will likely evolve. We will try to communicate expectations as we are able to and be responsive. We hope that the community will share their suggestions for improving this engagement. Based on the level of initial interest we receive and the availability of resources to evaluate contributions, we anticipate the following:

• We will initially prioritize pull requests that include small bug fixes and code that addresses potential vulnerabilities as well as pull requests that include improvements for processor language specifications because these require a reasonable amount of effort to evaluate and will help us exercise and revise our process for accepting contributions. In other words, we are going to start small in order to work out the kinks first.

• We are committed to maintaining the integrity and security of our code base. In addition to the careful review the maintainers will give to code contributions to make sure they do not introduce new bugs or vulnerabilities, we will be trying to identify best practices to incorporate with our open source project so that contributors can have more control over whether their contributions are accepted. These might include things like style guides and requirements for tests and documentation to accompany some code contributions. As a result, it may take a long time for some contributions to be accepted. This does not mean we are ignoring them.

• We are committed to integrating this GitHub project with our team's regular development work flow so that the open source project remains dynamic and relevant. This may affect our responsiveness and ability to accept pull requests quickly. This does not mean we are ignoring them.

• Not all innovative ideas need to be accepted as pull requests into this GitHub project to be valuable to the community. There may be times when we recommend that you just share your code for some enhancement to Ghidra from your own repository. As we identify and recognize extensions that are of general interest to the reverse engineering community, we may seek to incorporate them with our baseline.

Legal

Consistent with Section D.6. of the GitHub Terms of Service as of 2019, and Section 5. of the Apache License, Version 2.0, the project maintainer for this project accepts contributions using the inbound=outbound model. When you submit a pull request to this repository (inbound), you are agreeing to license your contribution under the same terms as specified in LICENSE (outbound).

This is an open source project. Contributions you make to this public U.S. Government ("USG") repository are completely voluntary. When you submit an issue, bug report, question, enhancement, pull request, etc., you are offering your contribution without expectation of payment, you expressly waive any future pay claims against the USG related to your contribution, and you acknowledge that this does not create an obligation on the part of the USG of any kind. Furthermore, your contributing to this project does not create an employer-employee relationship between the United States ("U.S.") Government and the contributor.