Lowering the barrier of entry

[Andy LoPresto]

Hi folks,

Based on some recent (and long-term) experiences, I wanted to discuss with the 
community what we could do to lower the barrier of entry to using & 
contributing to NiFi. I hope to get some good feedback from both long-time and 
newer members, and determine some immediate concrete steps we can take. 

Problems identified:
* NiFi has a number of custom profiles, so a simple “mvn clean install” in 
project root doesn’t get a new developer up and running immediately
* The API is very well defined, but for new contributors, it can be a challenge 
to know where to put functionality, and building a custom processor + NAR and 
deploying isn’t a one-step process
* Project size (and build size/time) is large. This can restrict the minimum 
hardware necessary, elongate the development cycle, etc. 
* Some new users do not receive mailing list replies

Possible solutions:
* On a clean git clone, “mvn clean install” should build a working instance. 
Maybe we provide a quickstart.sh script to handle the default maven build, 
change to the target directory, and start NiFi?
* Individual contributors have written excellent blogs, and documentation 
exists, but making it more prominent or more easily accessed could help? 
* Extension registry will solve all the world’s problems (related to bundling 
and build time)
* Not sure about this one — I don’t know if it’s because they’re not 
subscribed, their mail client is blocking them, etc. 

I’ve said my bit, now I am eager to hear from other community members on their 
experiences, steps that helped them, and suggestions for the future to continue 
to make the NiFi community welcoming to new users. Thanks. 


Andy LoPresto
alopre...@apache.org
alopresto.apa...@gmail.com
PGP Fingerprint: 70EC B3E5 98A6 5A3F D3C4  BACE 3C6E F65B 2F7D EF69

Re: Contributions and getting started

[Andy LoPresto]

Hi Ryan,

Glad to see you are having more success. I recommend subscribing to the 
dev@nifi.apache.org  mailing list because I don’t 
think you received the replies from the community over the last two days. You 
can view those here [1]. 

The gRPC bundle is not always required for the build, but if it exists, then 
subsequent builds do require that profile to be enabled. We hope to make this 
easier to handle with upcoming improvements. 

[1] 
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/570136ec0f230d5d22d707e029e9287effe12e31d78ffdbc7dabc09a@%3Cdev.nifi.apache.org%3E


Andy LoPresto
alopre...@apache.org
alopresto.apa...@gmail.com
PGP Fingerprint: 70EC B3E5 98A6 5A3F D3C4  BACE 3C6E F65B 2F7D EF69

> On Jan 23, 2019, at 9:51 PM, Matt Burgess  wrote:
> 
> Ryan,
> 
> I'm glad to join my NiFi community colleagues by saying "welcome
> aboard!!" and we'll do our best to get you up and running :) For the
> Jira part, Apache's Jira lets you create a case without being a
> contributor for that particular project. For that reason, there are a
> few NIFI cases out there that have In Progress or Patch Available (or
> other statuses) with nobody assigned. If the status is Patch Available
> and there is a link to a GitHub PR (even if  the Jira is Unassigned),
> IMO you can safely assume that the PR author is "assigned" to the case
> and that the NiFi PMC/committers will review when they can. If it is
> "In Progress" with nobody assigned and no attached patch or link to a
> GitHub PR, please let us know to make sure it doesn't get missed. I
> personally (if not already suggested by our contributor docs)
> recommend you create an Apache Jira account, and if/when you have one,
> we can add you as a contributor so you can assign case(s) to yourself,
> just let us know your username and that you'd like to be a
> contributor.
> 
> AFAIK, the Travis service and many of us build the entire repo without
> needing to active the grpc profile (there are a few profiles not
> activated by default), so we'd be very interested in any build
> failures you may encounter. Looking forward to working with you!
> 
> Cheers,
> Matty B
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jan 24, 2019 at 12:32 AM Ryan Withers  wrote:
>> 
>> Well I wanted to return to the group and report that I jumped the gun, and
>> that I have now achieved a successful build of the master branch
>> 1.9.0-SNAPSHOT.  I put myself back on the master branch and continued to
>> dig going this time to the development quickstart (
>> http://nifi.apache.org/quickstart.html).  I found there that you have to
>> run the following command:
>> 
>> mvn -T C2.0 clean install -Pinclude-grpc
>> 
>> I was just running 'mvn clean compile' and I think the module
>> nifi-toolkit-tls must have some kind of dependency that requires the
>> "include-grpc" flag.  Because that was where my dependency errors were
>> coming from.  I have not verified this though.  It could also be that there
>> are areas of the build that don't respond the same way to the targets I
>> passed in vs. the targets in the command that were successful.  I still
>> have some investigation to do to be sure I understand this completely.
>> 
>> I'm going to keep reading but I still have the same questions about
>> contributions as before.
>> 
>> With Jira I'm noticing there are some stories that say "in progress" or
>> "patch available" but none of them have an assignee.  Is the transition
>> between these states driven by automation or are people manually updating
>> the stories in Jira?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Ryan
>> 
>> On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 5:56 PM Ryan Withers  wrote:
>> 
>>> To whom it may concern,
>>> 
>>>  So my goal is to begin making contributions to the nifi product.  Right
>>> now I'm just trying to build the product from source and having some
>>> difficulty.
>>> 
>>> I've listed out the branches associated with the following repository (git
>>> clone https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/nifi.git)
>>> 
>>> I don't see any support branches related to 1.8.0 and it seems like the
>>> master branch has already been bumped to 1.9.0.   I recognize that if I
>>> want to contribute a change it likely has to be done against 1.9.0 rather
>>> than 1.8.0 but I've been having build issues against 1.9.0.  However, I did
>>> have a successful build against support/nifi-1.7.x.
>>> 
>>> Once I have the appropriate version of the source compiling I plan to pick
>>> an issue from your jira instance which I've been reading through.  Then
>>> perform a modification and walk through the pull request process.  With
>>> Jira I'm noticing there are some stories that say "in progress" or "patch
>>> available" but none of them have an assignee.  Is the transition between
>>> these states driven by automation or are people manually updating the
>>> stories in Jira?
>>> 
>>> Thanks in advance,
>>> 
>>> Ryan
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Ryan Withers
>>> Senior Software Developer / Analyst
>>> 
>>> http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanwithers
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 

Re: Help needed in contributing to nifi

[Sivaprasanna]

Hi Khamar,

It’s great to know that you are interested in contributing to the Apache
NiFi project. First place to start would be
https://issues.apache.org/jira/projects/NIFI/
Search if there is a Jira created already for the task you are interested
in. If you don’t find any, feel free to create one.

If you're also interested in contributing to the code, please take a look
at this contributor guide:
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NIFI/Contributor+Guide
It is basically installing Git and cloning the project and setting up
locally. It also gives you some detailed overview about the code review
process and other useful tips.

Thanks,
Sivaprasanna

On Thu, 24 Jan 2019 at 11:08 AM, khamar shaikh 
wrote:

> Hi ,  i am a student and new to open source contribution . I want to add
> Data
> pipeline capability with OrientDB . Can someone please help me with how to
> proceed to do the same?
>
> --
> Thank you and Regards,
>
> Khamar Ali Shaikh
>