# Contributing

## Basic Details

If you would like to contribute to the development of OpenStack, you must follow the steps in this page:

> https://docs.opendev.org/opendev/infra-manual/latest/developers.html

Once those steps have been completed, changes to OpenStack should be submitted for review via the Gerrit tool, following the workflow documented at:

> https://docs.opendev.org/opendev/infra-manual/latest/developers.html#development-workflow

Release notes are managed through the tool reno. This tool will create a new file under the directory `releasenotes` that should be checked in with the code changes.

Pull requests submitted through GitHub will be ignored.

Bugs should be filed on Launchpad, not GitHub:

> https://bugs.launchpad.net/pbr

## Running the Tests for pbr

The testing system is based on a combination of tox and testr. The canonical approach to running tests is to simply run the command `tox`. This will create virtual environments, populate them with dependencies and run all of the tests that OpenStack CI systems run. Behind the scenes, tox is running `testr run --parallel`, but is set up such that you can supply any additional testr arguments that are needed to tox. For example, you can run: `tox -- --analyze-isolation` to cause tox to tell testr to add `--analyze-isolation` to its argument list.

It is also possible to run the tests inside of a virtual environment you have created, or it is possible that you have all of the dependencies installed locally already. If you’d like to go this route, the requirements are listed in `requirements.txt` and the requirements for testing are in `test-requirements.txt`. Installing them via pip, for instance, is simply:

    pip install -r requirements.txt -r test-requirements.txt

If you go this route, you can interact with the testr command directly. Running `testr run` will run the entire test suite. `testr run --parallel` will run it in parallel (this is the default incantation tox uses). More information about testr can be found at: http://wiki.openstack.org/testr

this page last updated: 2026-02-08 22:52:26

Except where otherwise noted, this document is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. See all OpenStack Legal Documents.

found an error? report a bug