How to Contribute to Open-source Projects

Context

I have seen a lot of people contributing to GitHub projects in the most inefficient way possible & their way usually just supports one change rather than u making a fork for every change.

Init

First you have to choose a project to contribute to. A potential project which you can contribute to should lie in all of these conditions:

• You should be well aware with the language the project is using.
• You should understand how the project is laid out
• Beaware of any contribution rules

Steps

mostly the steps to contribute and make changes would look something like this:

• Fork the project
• Make a branch for your issue and name it appriopriately
• Clone the repository
• Make the change on the new branch
• Create a PR
• Include which issue is the PR fixing or what is the PR changes i.e. mention if the PR adds a feature which wasn’t there already

Example

Here we’ll use a Hugo theme as a example and see if we can fix any issues. The thinking behind using this specific theme is that its simple and I know Hugo inside-out.

Theme: https://github.com/mansoorbarri/coming-soon

Steps

Understand the issue:

Create a fork:

Make the changes & test it out:

Create a PR:

Note that you have to mention which issue u are fixing my the issue number which you can find next to the issue title. This allow all the people involved in the issue to see that there is a PR which fixes it & it makes it easier for people to see what the issue if from the PR.

Now just wait & see if the changes are alright and soon enough your code wiill be merged or declined.

Examples

Here are some of my recent contributions:

• GoKarna: https://github.com/526avijitgupta/gokarna/pull/197
• tldr: https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr/pull/11193
• winutil: https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil/pull/1113

you can see more contribution from my GitHub profile: https://github.com/mansoorbarri

that’s it <3