Workflow Get Source

Get the Source Code

This document goes over how a developer can get the ZFS source code for the purpose of making changes to it. For other purposes, please see the Get the Source Code page.

The Git master branch contains the latest version of the software, including changes that weren't included in the released tarball. This is the preferred source code location and procedure for ZFS development. If you would like to do development work for the ZFS on Linux Project, you can fork the Github repository and prepare the source by using the following process.

1. Go to the ZFS on Linux Project and fork both the ZFS and SPL repositories. This will create two new repositories (your forked repositories) under your account. Detailed instructions can be found at https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo/.
2. Clone both of these repositories onto your development system. This will create your local repositories. As an example, if your Github account is newzfsdeveloper, the commands to clone the repositories would be:

$ mkdir zfs-on-linux
$ cd zfs-on-linux
$ git clone https://github.com/newzfsdeveloper/spl.git
$ git clone https://github.com/newzfsdeveloper/zfs.git

3. Enter the following commands to make the necessary linkage to the upstream master repositories and prepare the source to be compiled:

$ cd spl
$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/zfsonlinux/spl.git
$ ./autogen.sh
$ cd ../zfs
$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs.git
$ ./autogen.sh
cd ..

The ./autogen.sh script generates the build files. If the build system is updated by any developer, these scripts need to be run again.