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sangbida merged 1 commit into from
Jun 16, 2026
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DEV.md: cheat sheet for developers and LLMs. #9212

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- Build with `--configure --enable-debugbuild` and `uv run make`. Much faster with `uv run make RUST=0`.
- Env vars for tests: `RUST=0` (if RUST plugins were not built), `VALGRIND=0` (much faster), `TIMEOUT=10` to speed failures (or 100 if VALGRIND=1).
- *gen.[ch] files are generated by the Makefile.
- ccan/ is imported from ccan repo: PRs should go there, then `make update-ccan`.
- Insert BOLT quotes (current version is checked out in .tmp.lightningrfc/) in source when dealing with protocol work, for `make check-source-bolt`. This ensures we keep up with spec changes. `...` means skip some, but not over a section boundary. `...` at the start means "continues directly from previous quote".
- `make check-source` does formatting checks.
- assert-based unit tests can "#include ../file.c", OR add objects to Makefile targets: `make update-mocks` will regenerate mocks for functions from link errors.
- Commits should be reviewable, bisectable, and include tests. Pattern: one commit adds a python test with @pytest.mark.xfail(strict=True), next commit fixes the problem and removes that line.
- Commits which fix crashes or bug MUST quote the bug for later searches: do not rely on being able to find the bug report in future!
- Commits which create signficant user (not developer!) visible changes should have Changelog-(Added|Deprecated|Changed|Fixed|EXPERIMENTAL) for assembling CHANGELOG.md at release time.
- Deprecations must use the deprecation infrastructure, and append to the table in doc/developers-guide/deprecated-features.md
- Adding a new JSON-RPC command requires the most careful design: start with doc/schemas/NAME.json and add doc/NAME.json to MARKDOWNPAGES in doc/Makefile. `make doc-all` will regen the rest.
- In pytest integration tests, name nodes l1, l2, etc in creation order. This matches the log prefixes they use (`lightningd-1` etc) and on test failure the logs and other ephemera will in /tmp/ltests-*/TESTNAME*/lightning-1/.
- In pytest, never assert that a command raises an exception without specifying *exactly what* it raises! Use `with pytest.raises(RpcError, match='xxx'):`
- tal_bytelen / tal_count of NULL are defined to be zero, and you may assume this.
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