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Contributing to Flux

“It takes a village” - that’s true for the Flux community as well. And there are countless ways to join the team and help out. In this post we list a lot of them. Some very small, so you can definitely do your part and join Team Flux as well!
By dholbach |

📈 Our Community is growing

We are very pleased to see that our community is growing, whichever metric you apply. Number of members in Slack or mailing list, newly added adopters or projects in our ecosystem - all numbers are going up. Even the length of our monthly updates is growing every month.

As many asked in the past months how to get involved in the Flux community, let’s walk you through some steps to join Team Flux!

Update: Earlier versions of this post referred to the pre-KubeCon Bug Bash. Unfortunately we had to cancel our participation.

First things first

The first thing to do is get in touch with us! The communication section on our website lists all the ways, but let’s drill into them in more detail.

  1. A good way to reach us and talk to us in real-time is on CNCF Slack. Get an invite here, then proceed to the #flux channel.

  2. We have public meetings on a weekly basis to talk about upcoming work and direction of the project. They are open to anyone and we very much want to welcome you to drop by, say Hi and introduce yourself. Here are the instructions.

  3. To generally stay up to date, you also might want to check out our blog, our Twitter and/or Flux group on LinkedIn.

Please say Hi, let us know what you are interested in and how we can help you get started. From hereon it depends on what you would like to do. Let’s take a look at different ways to get involved.

Interacting with GitHub

All code for the Flux project is available under the fluxcd organisation in GitHub. So if you are interested in contributing to Flux, it is a good idea to learn how things are organised and potentially get involved with responding to GitHub issues.

The Bug Scrub

For 9 months now, Kingdon Barrett has been organising the Flux Bug Scrub:

For us, a great way to get started, is to learn more about Flux through direct experience, when e.g. trying to reproduce issues reported by other Flux users, and the general business of chopping wood and carrying water.

Each week we will have one or more contributors with triage access in attendance, and attempt to review each issue in the target group. (The targets will vary by week, or by event date.) A key goal is to figure out if a given issue can be reproduced, and report our findings. Some issues don't provide enough info to get us all the way to reproduction, so we may ask more questions and wait for the submitter to respond.

The great thing about this is: we run this on a weekly basis, so every week you have the opportunity to learn from experienced Flux maintainers in a friendly setting, so all you need to do is check our calendar and turn up.

The Bug Bash

Unfortunately we will not be participating in the Bug Bash this KubeCon!

Despite earlier announcements claiming we would do this, we felt we could not do this well enough. If you were looking forward to this, we are sorry - but you know what: we still have the weekly Bug Scrub! Your weekly one-on-one mentoring to learn the ropes of working on Flux!

Participating in Flux Development

If you are interested in Flux development, great! We are always looking for new people to get started. Come and talk to us on Slack and in our meetings as suggested above - that makes collaboration usually a lot easier.

All of Flux Development is happening in the open, the priorities for the next releases are documented publicly and we continuously tag issues as “good first issues” if you are looking for suggestions.

Our contributor docs will likely be helpful as well!

If you are interested in Security, you might have seen how much we have done to improve security lately. We are very interested in doing more - and are always open to new ideas!

Meeting in person

As stated above KubeCon / CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 is just around the corner. It is going to happen in Valencia, Spain 16 - 20 May and we will have many Flux maintainers and contributors at our booth and presenting talks and be available to talk to in other events. This is your chance to meet, have a chat and get to know the team.

There will be a separate announcement, but here already is a short summary of what to look forward to.

Monday, 16 May

13:00 - 17:00 (Room 2H - Event Center): Flux Project Meeting: We will kick off the Flux get-togethers and festivities with an in-person meeting for all Flux users, contributors, maintainers and generally interested folks. This will be an opportunity to get to know each other, have a chat, see what people’s interests are and to potentially start contributing. ( Sign up here.) Contact people on the ground are: Somtochi Onyekwere and Scott Rigby.

Tuesday 17 May - GitOpsCon

Lots and lots of talks about GitOps in general and Flux in particular, here’s a short selection of what to look forward to:

Wednesday 18 May - Friday May 20 - KubeCon

Over these three days we are going to be at the Flux booth (both virtually and on the ground), so come over for a chat. We are planning loads of talks, demos and ample time to have a chat, get to know everyone, ask questions and have great new ideas together!

On top of that, here is a list of talks, workshops and sessions during those days:

If you can’t make it to KubeCon in person, we’ve got you covered as well. In addition to all of this, we are going to have a virtual booth with talks - will announce the schedule very soon.

Putting Flux to the Test

If you have already gathered some experience with Flux, you should be in a great position to help us further and move the project forward a lot. The term “Testing” might sound a bit dull to you, but there’s a lot that falls into this category, which is super important to us. You could for example:

  • verify bugs and make minimal test cases to help fix those issues
  • refine and expand on the existing unit and end-to-end tests
  • try Flux in new environments and figure out if it works, and if not, what it would take to make it work

As you can gather by now already - we’d love to join this effort!

Flux Advocacy

We all love GitOps and we have heard from many who use Flux that they integrated it into their machinery and afterwards “forgot about it” since it was “just doing its job”. That’s how we like it.

Still it is important to let people know and educate communities around you. So if you like blogging or giving talks, let us know and we can help promote your work, or collaborate on events or content.

Help answering questions

We receive questions and requests from our user base on Slack, also in Github Discussions and other places like e.g. Reddit as well. If you enjoy helping people, come and join the team. We are a friendly bunch and it can be quite satisfying to know you just helped somebody fix an issue, and potentially provided an onramp for them to join the community.

As part of this effort, we are always looking at improving our documentation, FAQ and how-tos. So making some of the learnt knowledge more generally available is of great use as well.

Flux Documentation and Website

https://fluxcd.io for many is the first impression of the project and documentation and blog posts the next interactions. We really want to make the project shine there, so if you have a knack for writing and/or organising content, come and talk to us. Web wizards are very welcome too! 💖

If you check out some of our last monthly update posts, you will get an idea of what we have been up to and how important it is to us.

Sorry, got no time - but still want to support

If you don’t have time for any of the above, that is entirely fine and understandable.

One good way how you can still help out, is by adding yourself to the Flux Adopters page, if your organisation is using it. We love hearing from folks using Flux projects. Contributors really love seeing where their software is being used and it gives our community a good idea of how wide-spread adoption really is.

The same goes for the Flux Ecosystem page. If you integrate with Flux, we want to hear from you!

⭐ And please star us on GitHub as well!

Conclusion

You might have heard the saying “It takes a village” before, and it is the same for Team Flux. The success of our project depends on many different people with many different skills. We love meeting you, we love helping you get started - just reach out and we are looking forward to meet you!

Talk to us

We love feedback, questions and ideas, so please let us know your personal use-cases today. Ask us if you have any questions and please

See you around!