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John Kerl 8ae20589eb CONTRIBUTING.md
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Contributing to Miller

Thanks for your interest in contributing! This page is a quick-start guide for code, test, and documentation contributions. It links out to more detailed docs rather than repeating them, so if something below feels thin, follow the link.

Asking questions / reporting issues

When filing a bug, please include your Miller version (mlr --version), OS, and a minimal repro (command line plus a few lines of sample input).

Getting the source and building

git clone https://github.com/johnkerl/miller
cd miller
make        # builds ./mlr
make check  # runs unit + regression tests

Miller is written in Go (1.25+ as of July 2026) with no non-standard-library runtime dependencies. For build details beyond make/go build, see the Building from source doc and README-dev.md.

Before opening a PR

Run the full developer workflow:

make dev

This formats code, builds, runs unit and regression tests, and regenerates docs/man-pages, in the right order. A PR that passes this is in good shape to submit.

A few conventions to follow:

  • Code should read like idiomatic, go fmt-clean Go. Miller favors clarity over cleverness, including some acceptable code duplication: see README-dev.md: Source-code goals.
  • Avoid line wraps at a terminal width of 120 columns, tabwidth 4.
  • Prose in docs/comments uses the Oxford comma.
  • Reference relevant issue numbers in commit messages where applicable.

Where to look depending on what you're changing

  • Adding or fixing a built-in DSL function: implement in pkg/bifs/, add unit tests alongside, update docs/src/.
  • Adding/changing a verb (transformer): see pkg/transformers/ and the directory-structure notes in README-dev.md.
  • Anything touching the DSL grammar (pkg/parsing/mlr.bnf): see README-dev.md for the tools/build-dsl regeneration step.
  • Tests: Miller's test suite is mostly scripted CLI invocations compared against expected output, plus a smaller set of Go unit tests. See test/README.md for how to run and add cases.
  • Documentation: the published docs are generated from docs/src/*.md.in files, not hand-edited .md. See README-docs.md for the edit/preview/build loop.
  • Performance work: see README-profiling.md for profiling Miller itself, and scripts/perf/README.md for the benchmark scripts used to produce the performance graphs in the docs.
  • Background on the Go port (history, design rationale, why Go over C): see README-go-port.md. Not required reading to contribute, but useful context for anything touching core internals like Mlrval or the record-stream architecture.

Using an AI coding assistant

If you're using Claude Code against this repo, CLAUDE.md has build/test commands and conventions written for that workflow. It's a supplement for AI-assisted contributions, not a replacement for this page.

License

Miller is licensed under the two-clause BSD license. Contributions are accepted under the same license.