Template for writing your own contributing guide
A template for writing your own contributing guide. Contributing guides are helpful documents that communicate how people can contribute to your open source project.
This template is meant to be a checklist to make sure you haven’t missed anything, rather than offering guidance on philosophy or approach. Your final guidelines may differ depending on your project and needs.
I made this template to share what I learned after reviewing 40 open source projects of all sizes and their contributing guides (or lack thereof). Thanks to all the examples used in this template:
Active Admin, Read The Docs, Mustache.js, Hoodie, Elasticsearch, Devise, Geocoder, Flask, Cucumber-ruby, Cookiecutter, Celery, Atom, Django, React, Require.js, Node.js, Ember.js, Chef, Puppet, Travis CI, Express, Meteor, Angular, StandardIssueLabels
Special thanks also to @mikeal and his post "Healthy Open Source" about Node.js's contribution policies for inspiring this project.
To use this template, create CONTRIBUTING.md in the top level of your project, copy the template, and fill it out with your information.
When you’re done, make sure people see your shiny new contributing guide:
Finally, a couple of tips to help you write:
That’s it!
This template reflects what I learned from reviewing the policies of many open source projects, not my experience as an open source maintainer. If you think something important is missing or should be different based on your experience, I'd love to hear it! (Keep in mind this is meant to be a first pass checklist, not a full-fledged guide in itself.) If you have suggestions for improving this template, open an issue on this project.
This template is available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 License, meaning you are free to use it for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, without any attribution back to me (public domain). If you use it in your project, I'd love to hear about it! (Find me here: @nayafia) But you are in no way required to do so.