qdrant/docs/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Qdrant

Important

All pull requests must target the dev branch. The master branch is used for releases only. Fork the repo, create your branch from dev, and set dev as the base branch when opening your PR. PRs opened against master will not be merged and you will be asked to retarget them.

We love your input! We want to make contributing to this project as easy and transparent as possible, whether it's:

• Reporting a bug
• Discussing the current state of the code
• Submitting a fix
• Proposing new features

We Develop with GitHub

We use github to host code, to track issues and feature requests, as well as accept pull requests.

We Use GitHub Flow, So All Code Changes Happen Through Pull Requests

Pull requests are the best way to propose changes to the codebase (we use GitHub Flow). We actively welcome your pull requests:

1. Fork the repo and create your branch from dev.
2. If you've added code that should be tested, add tests.
3. If you've changed APIs, update the documentation and API Schema definitions (see development docs)
4. Ensure the test suite passes.
5. Make sure your code lints (with cargo).
6. Issue that pull request!

Any contributions you make will be under the Apache License 2.0

In short, when you submit code changes, your submissions are understood to be under the same Apache License 2.0 that covers the project. Feel free to contact the maintainers if that's a concern.

Report bugs using GitHub's issues

We use GitHub issues to track public bugs. Report a bug by opening a new issue; it's that easy!

Write bug reports with detail, background, and sample code

Great Bug Reports tend to have:

• A quick summary and/or background
• Steps to reproduce
  • Be specific!
  • Give sample code if you can.
• What you expected would happen
• What actually happens
• Notes (possibly including why you think this might be happening, or stuff you tried that didn't work)

Use a Consistent Coding Style

If you are modifying Rust code, make sure it has no warnings from Cargo and follow Rust code style. The project uses rustfmt formatter. Please ensure to run it using the cargo +nightly fmt --all command. The project also use clippy lint collection, so please ensure running cargo clippy --workspace --all-features before submitting the PR.

Contributing with AI

At Qdrant, we recognize the usefulness of AI tools in software development. At the same time, we also observe the growing problem of a high volume of contributions, which require careful reviews.

To compensate for the lack of human attention budget, while keeping the quality and efficiency of contributions, we introduce the following principles for contributions with AI:

Do not communicate with real people through AI

When preparing a PR description or answering to comments, please avoid using AI tools to generate the content. We want to see PR documentation as a source of truth, so we can validate if the changes are actually following the intent. Avoid including AI-generated diagrams or walkthroughs of the code; if somebody would like to read them, they can always generate them themselves.

If you are using AI tools to generate PR, you are still responsible for the results

We expect you to understand the changes you propose and be able to answer questions about it. "I asked claude, and it generated this" is not an acceptable answer, and we might discard the PR if we find it hard to understand the changes.

Disclose if some parts of the PR are generated with AI tools

A good practice is to explicitly specify which commits are made using AI tools, and which commits are manual changes.

For example, a good PR description with AI-generated commits:

- [AI] feat: create a new fusion method for hybrid search
- [manual] fix: improve mutex handling in the new fusion method

Disclose initial prompt you used to generate the contribution

Code generation tools have the ability to perform modifications across the whole Qdrant codebase, so it becomes increasingly important to know what was the original intent communicated to the AI tool.

Sometimes, the problem may exist in the prompt itself, and even if the generated code is flawless, it may cause issues which are hard to spot in a review.

Example of a bad prompt:

Find bugs in the module and fix them

Try to keep your prompt as specific as possible, leaving no room for misinterpretation. If you are making incremental changes, please try to submit them as separate commits, so we can easily understand the intent of each change.

License

By contributing, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under its Apache License 2.0.