Welcome. If you have never opened a terminal, never touched Git, and never made a pull request in your life, you are in the right place. This guide takes you from zero to making a real contribution to an active open source project, one small step at a time.
You do not need to be a programmer to start. You do not need to know what half those words mean yet. That is what this guide is for.
We are not going to pretend otherwise. Reading is part of the work here, and it will take you longer than the faster routes that skip the parts you will need later.
Here is why it is worth it. Search for any of this and you get thousands of results: tutorials written for a version of Git that changed years ago, answers that assume you already know the thing you are trying to learn, and a growing pile of confident generated text that is subtly wrong in ways that are hard to spot while the subject is still new to you. Telling the good from the bad is a skill of its own, and it is not one you may have yet. That sorting is what quietly costs people weeks, and what makes some of them quit believing the fault was theirs.
What is here was chosen by people who have been through it, put in an order that builds, and cut down to what you actually need. Nothing is padded to look thorough. If something is in a guide, it is because leaving it out would have left you stuck later.
So read it rather than skim it, and type the commands as you go instead of saving them for later. It moves faster than it looks.
Anyone who wants to learn open source contribution from the ground up. It was written for Codetopia Community, but none of it is members only. If you found your way here from somewhere else, it is yours to use. You could be brand new to computers beyond browsing the web, or you could already know some of this and just want a refresher. Either way, start at the beginning. It moves fast once the basics click.
- Everything here is self paced. There is no schedule and no deadline.
- Each guide builds on the one before it. Do them in order the first time through.
- Every guide tells you exactly what to type and exactly what you should see happen. If what you see does not match, that is useful information, not a failure.
- Stuck? Every guide has a Stuck? section at the bottom listing what commonly goes wrong at that step. If that does not cover it, ask in GitHub Discussions using the Q&A category. That is the only place you need to ask, and it reaches the community Discord by itself. Getting Help covers how to ask so you get a fast answer. Someone else has almost certainly been stuck on the exact same thing.
Three pages to dip into whenever you need them, in any order:
- Glossary, every term these guides use, in plain language.
- Fixing Mistakes, how to undo anything you are likely to do wrong.
- Markdown, the formatting used in issues, pull
requests and every
.mdfile here.
You are not expected to memorise any of it, or to read these before starting. They are there for the moment you need them.
- What Is Open Source?
- Your Computer and the Terminal
- Installing and Configuring Git
- Your First Commit
- GitHub Account and SSH
- Your First Pull Request
- Reviewing a Pull Request
- Finding and Claiming an Issue
- Resolving a Merge Conflict
- Keeping Your Fork in Sync
- Reporting a Good Issue
- Finding Your First Real Project
By the end, you will have opened a real pull request, reviewed someone else's, resolved a merge conflict, reported a problem clearly enough for a stranger to act on, learned how to keep your fork in sync, and know how to find your way into a real project on your own.
This guide is open source too. If a step did not work for you, a command failed, or a paragraph confused you, you can fix it and every person after you benefits. See CONTRIBUTING.md for how, and do not worry if that sounds out of reach right now. It will not by the time you finish guide 05.
Everyone taking part here, in the repo and in the community, follows the Codetopia Community Code of Conduct. It is short, and it comes down to being decent to people who are learning. If someone is not, tell a maintainer.
These guides are © Codetopia Community and released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). See LICENSE for the full text.
In plain language: you may share these guides, adapt them, translate them, and use them for teaching, including commercially. The one condition is that you credit Codetopia Community and say if you changed anything. If you run a community and want to build on this, please do.
Open 00-what-is-open-source.md and start. It is a five minute read with nothing to install, and it explains why everything after it is worth doing.