Notes for NFD developers

If you are new to the NDN software community, please read our Contributor's Guide.

Code style

NFD code is subject to NFD code style.

Licensing

Contributions to NFD must be licensed under the GPL v3 or a compatible license. If you choose the GPL v3, please use the following license boilerplate in all .hpp and .cpp files:

/* -*- Mode:C++; c-file-style:"gnu"; indent-tabs-mode:nil; -*- */
/*
 * Copyright (c) [Year(s)], [Copyright Holder(s)].
 *
 * This file is part of NFD (Named Data Networking Forwarding Daemon).
 * See AUTHORS.md for complete list of NFD authors and contributors.
 *
 * NFD is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms
 * of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation,
 * either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
 *
 * NFD is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY;
 * without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
 * PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.
 *
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with
 * NFD, e.g., in COPYING.md file.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
 */

If you are affiliated to an NSF-supported NDN project institution, please use the NDN Team License Boilerplate.

Logging

Fine-grained per-module logging can be configured via the NDN_LOG environment variable. This is especially useful when running unit tests or tools such as nfdc that do not have a configuration file. See ndn-log(7) manual page for syntax and examples.

Unit tests

To run the unit tests, NFD needs to be configured and built with unit test support:

./waf configure --with-tests # --debug is also strongly recommended while developing
./waf

The simplest way to run the tests is to launch the compiled binary without any parameters:

# Run core tests
./build/unit-tests-core

# Run NFD daemon tests
./build/unit-tests-daemon

# Run tools tests (e.g., nfdc)
./build/unit-tests-tools

The Boost.Test framework is very flexible and allows a number of run-time customization of what tests should be run. For example, it is possible to choose to run only a specific test suite, only a specific test case within a suite, specific test cases across multiple test suites, and so on:

# Run only the PIT tests inside the Table test suite of NFD daemon tests
./build/unit-tests-daemon -t Table/TestPit

# Run only the test case "Find" from the previous test suite
./build/unit-tests-daemon -t Table/TestPit/Find

# Run the "Basic" test case from all NFD RIB test suites
./build/unit-tests-daemon -t Rib/*/Basic

By default, Boost.Test framework will produce verbose output only when a test case fails. If it is desired to see verbose output (result of each test assertion), add -l all option to ./build/unit-tests command. To see test progress, you can use -l test_suite, or -p to show a progress bar:

# Show report all log messages including the passed test notification
./build/unit-tests-daemon -l all

# Show test suite messages
./build/unit-tests-daemon -l test_suite

# Show nothing
./build/unit-tests-daemon -l nothing

# Show progress bar
./build/unit-tests-tools -p

There are many more command line options available, information about which can be obtained either from the command line using the --help switch, or online on the Boost.Test website.