1  Bitcoin Core integration/staging tree
 2  =====================================
 3  
 4  https://bitcoincore.org
 5  
 6  For an immediately usable, binary version of the Bitcoin Core software, see
 7  https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/.
 8  
 9  What is Bitcoin Core?
10  ---------------------
11  
12  Bitcoin Core connects to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network to download and fully
13  validate blocks and transactions. It also includes a wallet and graphical user
14  interface, which can be optionally built.
15  
16  Further information about Bitcoin Core is available in the [doc folder](/doc).
17  
18  License
19  -------
20  
21  Bitcoin Core is released under the terms of the MIT license. See [COPYING](COPYING) for more
22  information or see https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT.
23  
24  Development Process
25  -------------------
26  
27  The `master` branch is regularly built (see `doc/build-*.md` for instructions) and tested, but it is not guaranteed to be
28  completely stable. [Tags](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/tags) are created
29  regularly from release branches to indicate new official, stable release versions of Bitcoin Core.
30  
31  The https://github.com/bitcoin-core/gui repository is used exclusively for the
32  development of the GUI. Its master branch is identical in all monotree
33  repositories. Release branches and tags do not exist, so please do not fork
34  that repository unless it is for development reasons.
35  
36  The contribution workflow is described in [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md)
37  and useful hints for developers can be found in [doc/developer-notes.md](doc/developer-notes.md).
38  
39  Testing
40  -------
41  
42  Testing and code review is the bottleneck for development; we get more pull
43  requests than we can review and test on short notice. Please be patient and help out by testing
44  other people's pull requests, and remember this is a security-critical project where any mistake might cost people
45  lots of money.
46  
47  ### Automated Testing
48  
49  Developers are strongly encouraged to write [unit tests](src/test/README.md) for new code, and to
50  submit new unit tests for old code. Unit tests can be compiled and run
51  (assuming they weren't disabled in configure) with: `make check`. Further details on running
52  and extending unit tests can be found in [/src/test/README.md](/src/test/README.md).
53  
54  There are also [regression and integration tests](/test), written
55  in Python.
56  These tests can be run (if the [test dependencies](/test) are installed) with: `test/functional/test_runner.py`
57  
58  The CI (Continuous Integration) systems make sure that every pull request is built for Windows, Linux, and macOS,
59  and that unit/sanity tests are run automatically.
60  
61  ### Manual Quality Assurance (QA) Testing
62  
63  Changes should be tested by somebody other than the developer who wrote the
64  code. This is especially important for large or high-risk changes. It is useful
65  to add a test plan to the pull request description if testing the changes is
66  not straightforward.
67  
68  Translations
69  ------------
70  
71  Changes to translations as well as new translations can be submitted to
72  [Bitcoin Core's Transifex page](https://www.transifex.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/).
73  
74  Translations are periodically pulled from Transifex and merged into the git repository. See the
75  [translation process](doc/translation_process.md) for details on how this works.
76  
77  **Important**: We do not accept translation changes as GitHub pull requests because the next
78  pull from Transifex would automatically overwrite them again.