Development guide

Overview

This guide is targeted at developers looking to contribute to Feast:

• Project Structure

• Making a Pull Request

• Feast Data Storage Format

• Feast Protobuf API

Learn How the Feast Contributing Process works.

Project Structure

Feast is composed of multiple components distributed into multiple repositories:

Repository	Description	Component(s)
Main Feast Repository	Hosts all required code to run Feast. This includes the Feast Python SDK and Protobuf definitions. For legacy reasons this repository still contains Terraform config and a Go Client for Feast.	Python SDK / CLI Protobuf APIs Documentation Go Client Terraform
Feast Java	Java-specific Feast components. Includes the Feast Core Registry, Feast Serving for serving online feature values, and the Feast Java Client for retrieving feature values.	Core Serving Java Client
Feast Spark	Feast Spark SDK & Feast Job Service for launching ingestion jobs and for building training datasets with Spark	Spark SDK Job Service
Feast Helm Chart	Helm Chart for deploying Feast on Kubernetes & Spark.	Helm Chart

Making a Pull Request

See also the CONTRIBUTING.md in the corresponding GitHub repository (e.g. main repo doc)

Incorporating upstream changes from master

Our preference is the use of git rebase instead of git merge : git pull -r

Signing commits

Commits have to be signed before they are allowed to be merged into the Feast codebase:

# Include -s flag to signoff
git commit -s -m "My first commit"

Good practices to keep in mind

• Fill in the description based on the default template configured when you first open the PR

  • What this PR does/why we need it

  • Which issue(s) this PR fixes

  • Does this PR introduce a user-facing change

• Include kind label when opening the PR

• Add WIP: to PR name if more work needs to be done prior to review

• Avoid force-pushing as it makes reviewing difficult

Managing CI-test failures

• GitHub runner tests

  • Click checks tab to analyse failed tests

• Prow tests

  • Visit Prow status page to analyse failed tests

Feast Data Storage Format

Feast data storage contracts are documented in the following locations:

• Feast Offline Storage Format: Used by BigQuery, Snowflake (Future), Redshift (Future).
• Feast Online Storage Format: Used by Redis, Google Datastore.

Feast Protobuf API

Feast Protobuf API defines the common API used by Feast's Components:

• Feast Protobuf API specifications are written in proto3 in the Main Feast Repository.
• Changes to the API should be proposed via a GitHub Issue for discussion first.

Generating Language Bindings

The language specific bindings have to be regenerated when changes are made to the Feast Protobuf API:

Repository	Language	Regenerating Language Bindings
Main Feast Repository	Python	Run make compile-protos-python to generate bindings
Main Feast Repository	Golang	Run make compile-protos-go to generate bindings
Feast Java	Java	No action required: bindings are generated automatically during compilation.