Interested in contribution to gdg

[PavelsDenisovs]

Hey, I'm interested in contributing to gdg. I've read some docs and I'm currently learning more about Grafana itself to understand the system gdg interacts with. My plan is to spend the next 1-2 weeks getting familiar with Grafana and gdg's structure and then start picking up some beginner-friendly issues or improvements.

If there are any specific areas you think would be good to start with (or any issue you would like help with later, I'd be glad to hear your suggestions.

I just wanted to introduce myself and let you know I'm preparing to contribute soon

[safaci2000]

GDG is essentially a CLI interface to back/restore resources for the API. I also ended up adding several tooling to make my life easier.

1. [FEATURE] Support for Grafana V12 dashboards #422

Theres's a new API that was released for the dashboards that would be nice to try to add support to.

2. there's also a very alpha CLI client that was release by grafana: https://github.com/grafana/grafanactl I've been poking at it a bit to see if anything makes sense to use. Any of the enhancement labels would be good to look at.

https://github.com/esnet/gdg/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20label%3Aenhancement

3. If you have experience using TUI (Bubble tea has mostly been a pain to use for me) having something that would allow more robust config to be created would be nice to have.

4. Add a test somewhere I'm sure there's more coverage that would be nice. Especially on the CLI parsing and service invoking. it's very basic but I have had some bugs there in the past. Usually it's testing the rendering out, parameters parsing etc. The services are tested outside of that.

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TLDR: Usually the way I've developed gdg was I need a feature that is lacking. I look to see if the API supports it ( https://play.grafana.org/swagger) then create a basic list, download, upload, delete, (See: https://github.com/esnet/gdg/blob/main/internal/service/contracts.go )

The main thing to watch out for GDG is designed to mostly operate using a watchlist,

    watched:
      - General
      - linux%2Fgnu/*    # matches for a folder named linux/gnu
      - ES\+net/LHC\+Data\+Challenge # matches for dashboards in ES net/LHC Data Challenge

So everything you create should potentially take that into account. They all have a wildcard mode where they manage all resources or use the filters. Beyond that just pick any Grafana resource you want to add and go for it.

I have https://github.com/esnet/gdg/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md that's a bit dated but that might be useful as well.

Every feature needs:

• CLI entry point
• Update config example if there's changes
• Add a test
• Add documentation for the user.

[PavelsDenisovs]

Thanks a lot for a detailed guidance! I'll keep this in mind when I start working on my first task.

[safaci2000]

This might be good too: #480 I just added it. I haven't though much about it but some pattern to use like s3_name_auth.json or such. We should drop support for sensitive data in the importer.yml in the next minor release (0.9.0) and it would be nice to get rid of the S3 data as well.

Anyways, any issue is good, or any resource that grafana has that you want to include / import would be fine. The only limit really is what is supported by their official API. I keep having to form off my own REST call when the spec is either broken or does not line up with the way the code actually works.

[PavelsDenisovs]

I'd like to take this issue, though it might take me a bit longer since I’m new to this kind of task. Is that okay?
If you’d like, you can assign it to me and I’ll work through it.

[safaci2000]

I'm a bit swamped right now at work. Anything you want to contribute would be nice to have.

There's no particular timeline. I have not really advertised it much but there's a #gdg channel in the grafana slack if you need any help / guidance.