Contributing Guides
Contributing guides are essential for fostering constructive collaboration between contributors, ensuring that code and documentation changes are appropriate and well-reviewed, and helping potential contributors feel confident when working on your project. Even experienced developers may hesitate to contribute if the process for submitting code or documentation is unclear or inconsistent. A clear and welcoming Contributing Guide helps both new and seasoned developers contribute productively and collaboratively by outlining:
- How to contribute code changes, whether large or small
- How to review submitted code
- How to add new tests to the existing testing infrastructure
- How to write clear and complete bug reports
- How to contribute to the project’s documentation
Including this information helps maintain consistency in code style, testing practices, and documentation quality as new contributors join your project. By setting clear expectations, you remove ambiguity and guesswork for newcomers creating their first pull request. It also helps maintainers—and original authors—feel more comfortable sharing responsibility for the project’s continued growth and improvement.
Contributing guides also play a key role in cultivating a positive and inclusive contributor community. By defining what constitutes respectful communication, describing how contributors will be credited for their work, and outlining procedures for addressing issues when community guidelines are not followed, you create an environment where contributors feel valued and safe engaging with others.
This section covers:
- What to include in a Contributing Guide
- Examples of excellent Contributing Guides you can use as models
- How to decide how much control to maintain over your project
A Markdown template for an CONTRIBUTING guide is available in the companion template repository.