Contribution Guidelines

Contribution guidelines are essential for collaborative projects on GitHub as they help streamline collaboration, set expectations for contributions, and maintain the project's quality and consistency.

Where they live

GitHub looks for these in order: a CONTRIBUTING.md in the repository root, a docs/CONTRIBUTING.md, then .github/CONTRIBUTING.md, then the profile one. The first file found becomes the link shown on every new issue and pull request, so put it where people will find it.

What belongs in one

A contributor who has never seen the project needs four things answered before they can help: how to set it up, how to test it, what the project expects, and who to ask.

• Getting started — exact clone and install commands, not a link to installation instructions.
• How to submit a change — branch naming, commit message style, whether you sign your commits, and how to open a pull request.
• What to expect — will someone review this, how quickly, and what you should do if nobody has replied.
• Code of conduct — link to it, and mean it.

Keep it short and true

A guidelines file that contradicts the repository is worse than none, because people follow it and then get told they did it wrong. Anything that can be checked automatically should be checked automatically — a commit message hook, a linter in CI — and left out of the prose, so the document only has to stay right about things a machine cannot judge. See Commit Msg.

Templates

Issue and pull request templates ask for the same questions, so nobody has to guess. The repository this site lives in has them under .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/, and a blank pull request body is the most reliable way to get a review that misses the point.

A licence

Contributions need a licence to be usable. If the repository has no LICENSE, that is a gap worth closing before the first outside contribution arrives — see the licence section of the README.

Free Resources