Developing campaigns

What are campaigns?

Before diving into the technical part of campaigns, make sure to read up on what campaigns are, what they're not and what we want them to be.

Start by looking at the product page for code change management
Read through the first page of the campaigns documentation IMPORTANT: Watch the video!

Starting up your environment

Run ./enterprise/dev/start.sh — Wait until all repositories are cloned.
Follow the campaigns "Getting started" guide to setup campaigns.
Create your first campaign. Remember: If you create a campaign, you're opening real PRs on GitHub. Make sure only testing repositories are affected. If you create a large campaign, it takes a while to preview/create but also helps a lot with finding bugs/errors, etc.

Glossary

The code campaigns feature introduces a lot of new names, GraphQL queries and mutations and database tables. This section tries to explain the most common names and provide a mapping between the GraphQL types and their internal counterpart in the Go backend.

GraphQL type	Go type	Database table	Description
`Campaign`	`campaigns.Campaign`	`campaigns`	A campaign is a collection of changesets on code hosts. The central entity.
`ExternalChangeset`	`campaigns.Changeset`	`changesets`	Changeset is the unified name for pull requests/merge requests/etc. on code hosts.
`PatchSet`	`campaigns.PatchSet`	`patch_sets`	A patch set is a collection of patches that will be applied by creating and publishing a campaign. A campaign has one patch set.
`Patch`	`campaigns.Patch`	`patches`	A patch for a repository that can be turned into a changeset on a code host. It belongs to a patch set, which has multiple patches, one per repository.
-	`campaigns.ChangesetJob`	`changeset_jobs`	It represents the process of turning a `Patch` (GraphQL)/`campaigns.Patch` (Go) into a `Changeset` on the code host. It is executed asynchronously in the background when a campaign is created with a patch set.
`ChangesetEvent`	`campaigns.ChangesetEvent`	`changeset_events`	A changeset event is an event on a code host, e.g. a comment or a review on a pull request on GitHub. They are created by syncing the changesets from the code host on a regular basis and by accepting webhook events and turning them into changeset events.

Database layout

(To re-generate the diagram from the campaigns_database_layout.dot file with Graphviz, run: dot -Tsvg -o campaigns_database_layout.svg campaigns_database_layout.dot.)

Diving into the code as a backend developer

Read through ./cmd/frontend/graphqlbackend/campaigns.go to get an overview of the campaigns GraphQL API.
Read through ./internal/campaigns/types.go to see all campaigns-related type definitions.
Compare that with the GraphQL definitions in ./cmd/frontend/graphqlbackend/schema.graphql.
Start reading through ./enterprise/internal/campaigns/resolvers/resolver.go to see how the main mutation are implemented (look at createPatchSetFromPatches and createCampaign to see how the two main operations are implemented).
Then start from the other end, enterprise/cmd/repo-updater/main.go, and see how the enterprise repo-updater uses campaigns.Syncer to sync Changesets.

GitHub testing account

Campaigns create changesets (PRs) on code hosts. If you are not part of the Sourcegraph organization, we recommend you create dummy projects to safely test changes on so you do not spam real repositories with your tests. If you are part of the Sourcegraph organization, we have an account set up for this purpose.

To use this account, follow these steps:

Find the GitHub sd9 user in 1Password
Copy the Campaigns Testing Token
Change your dev-private/enterprise/dev/external-services-config.json to only contain a GitHub config with the token, like this:

{
  "GITHUB": [
    {
      "authorization": {},
      "url": "https://github.com",
      "token": "<TOKEN>",
      "repositoryQuery": ["affiliated"]
    }
  ]
}

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