This file should provide a complete guide to contributing to your project. It may or may not also contain a Code of Conduct for the project (in this repo we've included it separately in a CODE_OF_CONDUCT file). The goal is to encourage contributions and make new contributors feel welcome, so the tone should be friendly and instructions should be thorough. A large project with complex contribution guidelines may even break this file down into a directory structure within the repo and provide links to specific topics from this file (see Node.js).
A non-exhaustive list of things you might want to include (or link out to):
- How to contact the project's maintainers
- Links to channels where the project might be discussed (GitHub discussions within the repo, Stack Overflow, Discord, IRC, etc.)
- How to install the project and develop locally
- How and when to file GitHub issues
- Best practices and rules for initiating pull requests
- Description of the pull request review process
- Branch policies within the repo
- Code style and documentation guidelines
- Descriptions of any automation that exists in the repo
- Documentation procedures
- Changelog
- API endpoints
- Releases/Versioning
- Testing guidelines
- Debugging/troubleshooting instructions
- Node.js Foundation's Contribution Policy
- contribution-guide.org
- https://gist.github.com/nayafia/contributing-template
- https://gist.github.com/PurpleBooth/b24679402957c63ec426
- https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md
- automatic-contrib-prs - open CONTRIBUTING.md file PRs for a set of repos