Contributing

TaiDB is intentionally small. Contributions should keep the project easy to build, easy to audit, and easy to embed.

Good first contributions

• Documentation fixes.
• More examples.
• CLI help improvements.
• Reproducible benchmark scripts.
• Tests for corruption, recovery, import, and compaction behavior.

Before changing behavior

Run:

make check
make smoke

For native FFI changes:

cargo build --release --features native-ffi
make native-smoke

For packaging changes:

cargo publish --dry-run --allow-dirty

Docs development

The docs site lives in docs/.

cd docs
npm install
npm run dev

The docs require Node.js >=22.12.0.

Repository hygiene

Do not commit:

• .env files
• encryption keys
• generated databases
• benchmark output
• build artifacts
• local agent state
• dependency folders

Design principles

• Prefer Rust-first APIs.
• Keep source-only examples inspectable.
• Avoid adding platform packaging until the maintenance cost is justified.
• Back performance claims with reproducible scripts.
• Keep data safety work ahead of broad marketing claims.