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Contributing to Feder

Thank you for your interest in contributing to Feder. This document outlines the development workflow and the tools we use to maintain code quality.

Please also read the project's AI usage policy before submitting issues, discussions, pull requests, or commits that use AI assistance.

Prerequisites

We use mise to manage our development environment and tasks. Before you start, ensure you have the following installed:

  • mise
  • Rust (managed via mise)

Once mise is installed, you can set up the project by running:

mise install

Development workflow

We use mise tasks to automate common development steps. Please ensure your changes pass the automated checks before submitting a pull request.

Please open pull requests against the main branch of the Feder upstream repository.

Code formatting

We use rustfmt to maintain a consistent coding style. You can automatically format your code by running:

mise run fmt

Quality checks

Before pushing your changes, run the full suite of quality checks. This includes type checking, linting with Clippy, and verifying that the code is correctly formatted.

mise run check

We configure Clippy to treat all warnings as errors in Cargo.toml. This ensures that the codebase remains clean and free of common pitfalls. If mise run check fails, please address the reported issues before proceeding.

Project direction

Feder is still early-stage, so APIs and crate boundaries may change. The current direction is to build Feder as a Rust framework for ActivityPub applications with a portable protocol core and platform-specific runtimes.

The main architectural rule is:

The core decides what should happen. The runtime decides how it happens on a specific platform.

In practice, this means protocol decisions should stay separate from platform execution. The intended crate roles are:

  • feder-vocab: Type-safe representations of Activity Vocabulary objects, such as actors, notes, and activities.
  • feder-core: The portable ActivityPub protocol engine, responsible for protocol decisions and state transitions.
  • Runtime crates: Platform-specific execution layers for networking, storage, clocks, timers, async runtimes, and operating system or hardware integration.

When contributing to feder-core, avoid adding direct dependencies on HTTP clients or servers, databases, filesystems, async runtimes, system clocks, or platform-specific crates. Runtime crates may use those dependencies when appropriate, but those choices should not leak into the portable core.

Core behaviour should generally be tested by feeding an input into the core and asserting the returned actions. Core tests should not require real networking, storage, or async execution.

Git pre-commit hook

You can automate the quality checks by registering a Git pre-commit hook. This will run the check task every time you commit.

mise generate git-pre-commit --write --task=check