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Contributing to GitHub Desktop
👍 🎉 💖 Thanks for your interest! 💖 🎉 👍
The following is a set of guidelines for contributing to GitHub Desktop and its related projects, which are hosted in the Desktop organization on GitHub. These are just guidelines, not rules. Use your best judgment, and feel free to propose changes to this document in a pull request.
Note that GitHub Desktop is an evolving project, so expect things to change over time as the team learns, listens and refines how we work with the community.
Table Of Contents
What should I know before I get started?
What should I know before I get started?
Code of Conduct
This project adheres to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. Please report unacceptable behavior to opensource+desktop@github.com.
The Roadmap
GitHub Desktop recently announced its 1.0 release and are working towards deprecating the classic Mac and Windows applications.
Beyond that, we are working on a roadmap you can read here. The immediate milestones are more detailed, and the latter milestones are more fuzzy and subject to change.
If you have ideas or suggestions please read the Suggesting Enhancements section below to understand how to contribute your feedback.
How Can I Contribute?
Reporting Bugs
This section guides you through submitting a bug report for GitHub Desktop. Following these guidelines helps maintainers and the community understand your report 📝, reproduce the behavior 💻 💻, and find related reports 🔎.
Before creating bug reports, please check this list as you might find out that you don't need to create one. When you are creating a bug report, please include as many details as possible. Fill out the required template, the information it asks for helps us resolve issues faster.
Before Submitting A Bug Report
Perform a cursory search to see if the problem has already been reported. If it does exist, add a 👍 to the issue to indicate this is also an issue for you, and add a comment to the existing issue if there is extra information you can contribute.
How Do I Submit A (Good) Bug Report?
Bugs are tracked as GitHub issues.
Simply create an issue on the GitHub Desktop issue tracker and fill out the provided issue template.
The information we are interested in includes:
- details about your environment - which build, which operating system
- details about reproducing the issue - what steps to take, what happens, how often it happens
- other relevant information - log files, screenshots, etc
Suggesting Enhancements
This section guides you through submitting an enhancement suggestion for GitHub Desktop, including completely new features and minor improvements to existing functionality. Following these guidelines helps maintainers and the community understand your suggestion 📝 and find related suggestions 🔎.
Before creating enhancement suggestions, please check this list as you might find out that you don't need to create one. When you are creating an enhancement suggestion, please include as many details as possible. Fill in the template, including the steps that you imagine you would take if the feature you're requesting existed.
Before Submitting An Enhancement Suggestion
Perform a cursory search to see if the enhancement has already been suggested. If it has, add a 👍 to indicate your interest in it, or comment if there is additional information you would like to add.
How Do I Submit A (Good) Enhancement Suggestion?
Enhancement suggestions are tracked as GitHub issues.
Simply create an issue on the GitHub Desktop issue tracker and fill out the provided issue template.
Some additional advice:
- Use a clear and descriptive title for the feature request
- Provide a step-by-step description of the suggested enhancement This additional context helps the maintainers understand the enhancement from your perspective
- Explain why this enhancement would be useful to GitHub Desktop users
- Include screenshots and animated GIFs if relevant to help you demonstrate the steps or point out the part of GitHub Desktop which the suggestion is related to. You can use this tool to record GIFs on macOS and Windows
- List some other applications where this enhancement exists, if applicable
Help Wanted
As part of building GitHub Desktop, we'll identify tasks that are good for external contributors to pick up. These tasks:
- have low impact, or have a known workaround
- should be addressed
- have a narrow scope and/or easy reproduction steps
- can be worked on independent of other tasks
These issues will be labelled as help wanted
in the repository. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please
comment on the issue to let the core team (and the community) know you are
interested in the issue.
Additional Notes
Issue and Pull Request Labels
This section lists the labels we use to help us track and manage issues and pull requests.
Type of Issue and Issue State
| Label name | 🔎 | Description |
|---|---|---|
enhancement |
search | Feature requests |
bug |
search | Confirmed bugs or reports that are very likely to be bugs |
more-information-needed |
search | More information needs to be collected about these problems or feature requests (e.g. steps to reproduce) |
reviewer-needs-to-reproduce |
search | Potential bugs that still need to be reliably reproduced by a reviewer |
stale |
search | Issues that are inactive and marked to be closed |
macOS |
search | Issues specific to macOS users |
Windows |
search | Issues specific to Windows users |
codemirror |
search | Issues related to our use of CodeMirror that may require upstream fixes |
electron |
search | Issues related to our use of Electron that may require upstream fixes |
themes |
search | Issues related the light or dark themes that ship in Desktop |
Topics
| Label name | 🔎 | Description |
|---|---|---|
help wanted |
search | Issues marked as ideal for external contributors |
tech-debt |
search | Issues related to code or architecture decisions |
needs-design-input |
search | Issues that require design input from the core team before the work can be started |
Workflow
| Label name | 🔎 | Description |
|---|---|---|
infrastructure |
search | Pull requests not related to the core application - documentation, dependencies, tooling, etc |
ready-for-review |
search | Pull Requests that are ready to be reviewed by the maintainers |