How to Contribute

This project welcomes third-party code via GitHub pull requests.

You are welcome to propose and discuss enhancements using project issues.

Branching Policy: The master branch is considered stable, at all times. The development branch is the one where all contributions must be merged before being promoted to master. If you plan to propose a patch, please commit into the development branch, or its own feature branch.

We recommend enabling Github Actions on your fork of librealsense to make sure the changes compile on all platforms and pass unit-tests.

In addition, please run pr_check.sh and api_check.sh under scripts directory. These scripts verify compliance with project’s standards:

Every example / source file must refer to LICENSE
Every example / source file must include correct copyright notice
For indentation we are using spaces and not tabs
Line-endings must be Unix and not DOS style
Every API header file must be able to compile as the first included header (no implicit dependencies)

Most common issues can be automatically resolved by running ./pr_check.sh --fix

Please familirize yourself with the Apache License 2.0 before contributing.

Step-by-Step

Make sure you have git and cmake installed on your system. On Windows we recommend using Git Extensions for git bash.
Run git clone https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense.git and cd librealsense
To align with latest status of the development branch, run:

git fetch origin
git checkout development
git reset --hard origin/development

git checkout -b name_of_your_contribution to create a dedicated branch
Make your changes to the local repository
Make sure your local git user is updated, or run git config --global user.email "email@example.com" and git config --global user.user "user" to set it up. This is the user & email that will appear in GitHub history.
git add -p to select the changes you wish to add
git commit -m "Description of the change"
Make sure you have a GitHub user and fork librealsense
git remote add fork https://github.com/username/librealsense.git with your GitHub username
git fetch fork
git push fork to push name_of_your_contribution branch to your fork
Go to your fork on GitHub at https://github.com/username/librealsense
Click the New pull request button
For base combo-box select development, since you want to submit a PR to that branch
For compare combo-box select name_of_your_contribution with your commit
Review your changes and click Create pull request
Wait for all automated checks to pass
The PR will be approved / rejected after review from the team and the community

To continue to new change, goto step 3. To return to your PR (in order to make more changes):

git stash
git checkout name_of_your_contribution
Repeat items 5-8 from the previous list
git push fork The pull request will be automatically updated

Comment about the Wrappers

It is very time consuming (and often impossible) for a single developer to test contributed functionality using all of the supported wrappers. There is no expectation of adding new functionality to all of the wrappers. One noteable exception is maintaining parity of public enumerations. Without strict maintanance it is easy for these lists to go out of sync and this can have serious runtime consequences.

For example, when adding new value to rs2_option enum, please also add it to:

The list of Matlab options under wrappers/matlab/option.m
The list of options for Unreal Engine integration
The list of options in the C# wrapper - wrappers/csharp/Intel.RealSense/Types/Enums/Option.cs
The list of Java options used for Android integration - wrappers/android/librealsense/src/main/java/com/intel/realsense/librealsense/Option.java
The list of options in the python wrapper

Once all are updated Github Actions will give clear indication that each of the wrappers is still passing compilation.