How to contribute to Open Source 🌎🐙
In this world full of opportunities💡, we find ourselves debating how we may contribute to open source, which is vast and open for everybody; all you need to do is find issues and solve them; it’s that simple.
Major Tech businesses open source (make their code visible and accessible to anyone/everyone) their codebase on the internet in order to improve and address huge problems that may take a long time to understand. There are no prerequisites for the contribution you make, which can be technical code or non-technical(Documentation).
Yes, as you may have guessed, we can now contribute to open source not only through technical means, but also by maintaining and writing technical documents that help us understand the code base much more easily. Correct documentation is important not only for comprehending the code, but also for maintaining proper flow.
So what are we waiting for lets understand how can we contribute to open source by following the below steps.
Step 1: Prerequisite
A Github account and Git for local use are required. If you’re having trouble setting up your Git and Github accounts, there are tonnes of free videos on YouTube you can watch, or here’s a link to mine.
Step 2: Understanding Basic Git Commands. I know you have chatgpt to help you out, but you can also look at the image below.
Step 3: Jump on to Github.
Select a repo and find good first issue or the issue that is currently in progress.
Fork the repository by forking the entire project. Github will create a project in your account that you can now clone to your local.
Step 4: Is to clone the repository you can clone the repo into your local machine using the command git clone following with weburl from the Github. Follow the images below it would help you understand.
Step 5: Now you have the code in your local machine you need to setup the project for the necessary development enviorments that the project requires for that I will strongly recommend to thoroughly go through the projects README.MD file.
Step 6: Is to create branch name correct me I am wrong should be the name of the bug that you are fixing or so on. Something that resonates what are you working on :)
Step 7: Work on the project fix the Issue and Save changes(commit) and push onto your Remote repo that you created by forking the project.
Step 8: {Creating Pull Request}
There will be option to create a Pull Request so that the changes and bugs that you solved get merged to the Main Repo.
Step 9: Describe your Pull Request.
Many a time Project Maintainers expects a good Description of what have you done and what changes it will make finally, so writing a good description plays a vital role.
Step 10: Merged wohoooo these is time to celebrate🎉 as the changes you made gets accepted and now you have done your first open Source contribiution !
