Beginner's Guide to Open-Source Contributions

Read the Documentation There are a few essential documents that you must read. These might be .md files, .rst files, or specific pages on the project’s website: README.md: The file that introduces the project. Contribution Guide: This outlines how to contribute to the project, including any formatting or styling rules you need to follow when submitting contributions. Code of Conduct: The community’s behavior guidelines. Generally, as long as you are not too rude or disrespectful, you should be fine, but it’s still important to read through it. Issue Tracker Understand what issue tracker the project uses. Common ones include GitHub issues or JIRA. As a beginner, it’s typical to start by looking for existing issues to work on. If you need to open an issue, be sure to search first to see if a similar issue has already been opened. ...

Initial Process To develop an open-source project, we must first Fork the Repository , as it is not our own project, and we don’t have write access. Once we fork the repository, an identical copy will appear under our account. We usually refer to the original project as the upstream repo and the forked copy as the downstream repo. Since we have write access to the forked repository, the first step is to clone it . Note that we should clone our forked repo, not the upstream repo. ...