Developer Guide

This development guide will take you through the steps required to start development work with Gaffer. This guide is not for end users of Gaffer and is instead targeted at those who wish to develop Gaffer or build Gaffer extensions.

Source Control

Development of Gaffer is done on the GCHQ/Gaffer GitHub repository, or other Gaffer GitHub repositories under the GCHQ Organization.

Repositories

The core Java Gaffer repo contains the main Gaffer product. If you are completely new to Gaffer you can try out our Road Traffic Demo or look at our example deployment guide.

The gafferpy repo contains a Python shell that can execute operations.

The gaffer-docker repo contains the code needed to run Gaffer using Docker or Kubernetes. More information about running a containerised instance of Gaffer can be found in our adminstration guide.

It is also worth noting the koryphe repo as this is a key dependency for Gaffer. It contains an extensible functions library for filtering, aggregating and transforming data based on the Java Function API.

Building Gaffer

Build Instructions

The latest instructions for building Gaffer are in our README.

Supported Platforms

A recent Linux distribution is recommended, although it should be possible to build Gaffer on any system which has the latest version of Java 8 or 11 (the Gaffer codebase uses Java 8). Running tests on Windows is not recommended due to complexities with native libraries.

Contributing

We welcome contributions to the project. See our ways of working for more detail. All contributors must sign the GCHQ Contributor Licence Agreement.

You can quickly and easily contribute towards Gaffer using a remote coding environment such as GitHub Codespaces or Gitpod.