Contributing to Llama-Stack — llama-stack documentation (original) (raw)

We want to make contributing to this project as easy and transparent as possible.

Discussions -> Issues -> Pull Requests

We actively welcome your pull requests. However, please read the following. This is heavily inspired by Ghostty.

If in doubt, please open a discussion; we can always convert that to an issue later.

I’d like to contribute!

All issues are actionable (please report if they are not.) Pick one and start working on it. Thank you. If you need help or guidance, comment on the issue. Issues that are extra friendly to new contributors are tagged with “contributor friendly”.

I have a bug!

Search the issue tracker and discussions for similar issues.
If you don’t have steps to reproduce, open a discussion.
If you have steps to reproduce, open an issue.

I have an idea for a feature!

Open a discussion.

I’ve implemented a feature!

If there is an issue for the feature, open a pull request.
If there is no issue, open a discussion and link to your branch.

I have a question!

Open a discussion or use Discord.

Opening a Pull Request

Fork the repo and create your branch from main.
If you’ve changed APIs, update the documentation.
Ensure the test suite passes.
Make sure your code lints using pre-commit.
If you haven’t already, complete the Contributor License Agreement (“CLA”).
Ensure your pull request follows the conventional commits format.

Contributor License Agreement (“CLA”)

In order to accept your pull request, we need you to submit a CLA. You only need to do this once to work on any of Meta’s open source projects.

Complete your CLA here: https://code.facebook.com/cla

Issues

We use GitHub issues to track public bugs. Please ensure your description is clear and has sufficient instructions to be able to reproduce the issue.

Meta has a bounty program for the safe disclosure of security bugs. In those cases, please go through the process outlined on that page and do not file a public issue.

Set up your development environment

We use uv to manage python dependencies and virtual environments. You can install uv by following this guide.

You can install the dependencies by running:

cd llama-stack uv sync --extra dev uv pip install -e . source .venv/bin/activate

[!NOTE] You can pin a specific version of Python to use for uv by adding a .python-version file in the root project directory. Otherwise, uv will automatically select a Python version according to the requires-python section of the pyproject.toml. For more info, see the uv docs around Python versions.

Note that you can create a dotenv file .env that includes necessary environment variables:

LLAMA_STACK_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8321 LLAMA_STACK_CLIENT_LOG=debug LLAMA_STACK_PORT=8321 LLAMA_STACK_CONFIG= TAVILY_SEARCH_API_KEY= BRAVE_SEARCH_API_KEY=

And then use this dotenv file when running client SDK tests via the following:

uv run --env-file .env -- pytest -v tests/integration/inference/test_text_inference.py --text-model=meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct

Pre-commit Hooks

We use pre-commit to run linting and formatting checks on your code. You can install the pre-commit hooks by running:

uv run pre-commit install

After that, pre-commit hooks will run automatically before each commit.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to install the pre-commit hooks, you can run the checks manually by running:

uv run pre-commit run --all-files

[!CAUTION] Before pushing your changes, make sure that the pre-commit hooks have passed successfully.

Running unit tests

You can run the unit tests by running:

source .venv/bin/activate ./scripts/unit-tests.sh

If you’d like to run for a non-default version of Python (currently 3.10), pass PYTHON_VERSION variable as follows:

source .venv/bin/activate PYTHON_VERSION=3.13 ./scripts/unit-tests.sh

Running integration tests

You can run integration tests following the instructions here.

Adding a new dependency to the project

To add a new dependency to the project, you can use the uv command. For example, to add foo to the project, you can run:

Coding Style

Comments should provide meaningful insights into the code. Avoid filler comments that simply describe the next step, as they create unnecessary clutter, same goes for docstrings.
Prefer comments to clarify surprising behavior and/or relationships between parts of the code rather than explain what the next line of code does.
Catching exceptions, prefer using a specific exception type rather than a broad catch-all like Exception.
Error messages should be prefixed with “Failed to …”
4 spaces for indentation rather than tabs

Common Tasks

Some tips about common tasks you work on while contributing to Llama Stack:

Using `llama stack build`

Building a stack image (conda / docker) will use the production version of the llama-stack and llama-stack-client packages. If you are developing with a llama-stack repository checked out and need your code to be reflected in the stack image, set LLAMA_STACK_DIR and LLAMA_STACK_CLIENT_DIR to the appropriate checked out directories when running any of the llama CLI commands.

Example:

cd work/ git clone https://github.com/meta-llama/llama-stack.git git clone https://github.com/meta-llama/llama-stack-client-python.git cd llama-stack LLAMA_STACK_DIR=$(pwd) LLAMA_STACK_CLIENT_DIR=../llama-stack-client-python llama stack build --template <...>

Updating Provider Configurations

If you have made changes to a provider’s configuration in any form (introducing a new config key, or changing models, etc.), you should run ./scripts/distro_codegen.py to re-generate various YAML files as well as the documentation. You should not change docs/source/.../distributions/ files manually as they are auto-generated.

Building the Documentation

If you are making changes to the documentation at https://llama-stack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, you can use the following command to build the documentation and preview your changes. You will need Sphinx and the readthedocs theme.

cd docs uv sync --extra docs

This rebuilds the documentation pages.

uv run make html

This will start a local server (usually at http://127.0.0.1:8000) that automatically rebuilds and refreshes when you make changes to the documentation.

uv run sphinx-autobuild source build/html --write-all

Update API Documentation

If you modify or add new API endpoints, update the API documentation accordingly. You can do this by running the following command:

uv run --with ".[dev]" ./docs/openapi_generator/run_openapi_generator.sh

The generated API documentation will be available in docs/_static/. Make sure to review the changes before committing.

License

By contributing to Llama, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under the LICENSE file in the root directory of this source tree.

See the Adding a New API Provider which describes how to add new API providers to the Stack.