# Contributing to apaxy First and foremost, thank you! We appreciate that you want to contribute to apaxy, your time is valuable, and your contributions mean a lot to us. ## Important! By contributing to this project, you: - Agree that you have authored 100% of the content - Agree that you have the necessary rights to the content - Agree that you have received the necessary permissions from your employer to make the contributions (if applicable) - Agree that the content you contribute may be provided under the Project license(s) ## Getting started **What does "contributing" mean?** Creating an issue is the simplest form of contributing to a project. Creating a merge reques is more efficient form of contributing. But there are many ways to contribute, including the following: - Updating or correcting documentation - Feature requests - Bug reports If you'd like to learn more about contributing in general, the [Guide to Idiomatic Contributing](https://github.com/jonschlinkert/idiomatic-contributing) has a lot of useful information. **Showing support for apaxy** Please keep in mind that open source software is built by people like you, who spend their free time creating things the rest the community can use. Don't have time to contribute? No worries, here are some other ways to show your support for apaxy: - star the [project](https://github.com/oupala/apaxy) - tweet your support for apaxy ## Issues ### Before creating an issue Please try to determine if the issue is caused by an underlying library, and if so, create the issue there. Sometimes this is difficult to know. We only ask that you attempt to give a reasonable attempt to find out. Oftentimes the readme will have advice about where to go to create issues. Try to follow these guidelines - **Investigate the issue**: - **Check the readme** - oftentimes you will find notes about creating issues, and where to go depending on the type of issue - Create the issue in the appropriate repository ### Creating an issue Please be as descriptive as possible when creating an issue. Give us the information we need to successfully answer your question or address your issue by answering the following in your issue: - **version**: please note the version of apaxy are you using - **extensions, plugins, helpers, etc** (if applicable): please list any extensions you're using - **error messages**: please paste any error messages into the issue, or a [gist](https://gist.github.com/) ### Closing issues The original poster or the maintainer's of apaxy may close an issue at any time. Typically, but not exclusively, issues are closed when: - The issue is resolved - The project's maintainers have determined the issue is out of scope - An issue is clearly a duplicate of another issue, in which case the duplicate issue will be linked - A discussion has clearly run its course ## Pull requests ### Before creating a merge request Please try to determine if the issue is caused by an underlying library, and if so, create the merge request there. Sometimes this is difficult to know. We only ask that you attempt to give a reasonable attempt to find out. Oftentimes the readme will have advice about where to go to create merge requests. Try to follow these guidelines - **Investigate the issue**: - **Check the readme** - oftentimes you will find notes about creating issues, and where to go depending on the type of issue - Create the merge request in the appropriate repository ### Creating a merge request Please be as descriptive as possible when creating a merge request. Give us the information we need to successfully understand what you want to change or to add to apaxy. Create the merge request as soon as possible so that the discussion around your changes can start at the beginning of your work, not when it's over and you don't time anymore to discuss it. ### Closing merge requests The original poster or the maintainer's of apaxy may close a merge request at any time. Typically, but not exclusively, issues are closed when: - The merge request has conflict with the develop branch that makes it difficult to merge without a hard work - The commit message of each commit of the merge request does not follow the [conventional commits](https://www.conventionalcommits.org/) standard - The project's maintainers have determined the merge request is out of scope - A merge request is clearly a duplicate of another merge request, in which case the duplicate merge request will be linked - A discussion has clearly run its course ## Next steps **Tips for creating idiomatic issues** Spending just a little extra time to review best practices and brush up on your contributing skills will, at minimum, make your issue easier to read, easier to resolve, and more likely to be found by others who have the same or similar issue in the future. At best, it will open up doors and potential career opportunities by helping you be at your best. The following resources were hand-picked to help you be the most effective contributor you can be: - The [Guide to Idiomatic Contributing](https://github.com/jonschlinkert/idiomatic-contributing) is a great place for newcomers to start, but there is also information for experienced contributors there - Take some time to learn basic markdown. We can't stress this enough. Don't start pasting code into GitHub issues before you've taken a moment to review this [markdown cheatsheet](https://gist.github.com/jonschlinkert/5854601) - The GitHub guide to [basic markdown](https://help.github.com/articles/markdown-basics/) is another great markdown resource - Learn about [GitHub Flavored Markdown](https://help.github.com/articles/github-flavored-markdown/). And if you want to really go above and beyond, read [mastering markdown](https://guides.github.com/features/mastering-markdown/) At the very least, please try to: - Use backticks to wrap code. This ensures that it retains its formatting and isn't modified when it's rendered by GitHub, and makes the code more readable to others - When applicable, use syntax highlighting by adding the correct language name after the first "code fence"