Contributing

Contributing Guide

Thank you for taking the time to contribute. Every bug report, doc fix, and pull request makes Ferret better.

Full guide in the repo

The complete contributing guide — including extension walkthroughs for new AI providers, platforms, slash commands, vector stores, and agent channels — lives in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Development setup

Tool	Version
Rust	stable ≥ 1.78 (`rustup update stable`)
Cargo	bundled with Rust
Git	any recent
Ollama	optional, for RAG tests
Docker	optional, for Qdrant / ChromaDB

shell

git clone https://github.com/Arunachalamkalimuthu/merlin-ai-code-review.git
cd ferret
cargo build          # debug build — verifies everything compiles
cargo test           # run all 93+ tests

Local quality gate

All three commands must pass before opening a PR.

shell

cargo fmt --check              # formatting
cargo clippy -- -D warnings    # zero warnings required
cargo test                     # all tests

Project structure

Path	Purpose
`src/ai/`	AI provider backends (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Bedrock, Ollama, Claude Code)
`src/platform/`	VCS platform clients (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure, Gitea)
`src/tools/`	Slash command implementations
`src/rag/`	RAG pipeline (embedder, stores, indexer, retriever)
`src/agent/`	ReAct agent (runtime, memory, tools, channels)
`src/review/`	Core review orchestration engine
`src/diff/`	Unified diff parser
`src/webhook/`	Axum webhook server (bot mode)

Adding a new slash command

Create src/tools/<name>.rs and implement the FerretTool trait
Register in src/tools/mod.rs → route_command()
Add an entry to the agent's builtin_tools() in src/agent/tools.rs
Document in README and this docs site
Add unit tests

shell

# Minimal FerretTool implementation
# src/tools/my_tool.rs
use async_trait::async_trait;
use crate::tools::{FerretTool, ToolContext};
use crate::error::Result;
pub struct MyTool;
#[async_trait]
impl FerretTool for MyTool {
    fn name(&self) -> &'static str { "my_tool" }
    async fn run(&self, ctx: &ToolContext) -> Result<String> {
        let diff = ctx.platform.get_diff().await?;
        let result = ctx.ai.generate("system prompt", &diff).await?;
        ctx.platform.post_summary(&result).await?;
        Ok(result)
    }
}

Commit convention

Use Conventional Commits:

text

feat(rag): add Pinecone vector store backend
fix(platform/github): handle 404 when PR has no diff
docs: update README with RAG quick-start guide
chore: bump reqwest to 0.12.5

Pull request checklist

cargo fmt --check passes
cargo clippy -- -D warnings passes
cargo test passes
New behaviour is covered by tests
Documentation is updated (README, this docs site, CONTRIBUTING.md)
Branch is rebased on main