How to make my first open-source contribution

First open-source contribution, Sounds cool

When starting out on open-source, it can really be frustrating for finding projects to make your first contribution. And after finding out the process will look overwhelming but this will guide through the process of making your first open-source contribution.

Some Prerequisites

And yes there are Prerequisites to making your first contribution and it's only git. Linus Torvalds made this awesome tool for tracking changes to project and collaborating with other developers on the same project. If your are not familiar with git I recommend following this tutorial.

Note: Remember that contribution is not only about code it's also about fixing a typo, documentation, translation, licensing and more.

1. Finding an open-source project to contribute

Here are the list of websites where you can find open-source project:

1. github explore
2. open-source friday
3. first timers only
4. codetriage
5. 24 pull requests
6. upforgrabs
7. source sort
8. opensauced

For your first contribution check these:

1. first-contribution
2. open-source-practice
3. My first quote

So now you have the projects, how are you going to contribute to it.

Structure of open-source projects

Open-source projects have mostly these files on their root directory :

1. Open-source license: An open source license guarantees that others can use, copy, modify, and contribute back to your project
2. contributing guidelines: this tells the audience how they can participate in the project.
3. README : explains how people can use the project.
4. Code of conduct: setting the rules for participants.

So having these files makes a project open-source.

Reading the contributing guidelines is a must before making a pull request becuase it contains the process for contribution.

The most common steps for contributing

1. Fork the project.
2. Clone the repository
3. Create your own branch(git checkout -b your-branch-name).
4. Make changes (the changes you made to the project).
5. Add changes to staging area(git add the_file_you_changed_or_modified).
6. commit changes(git commit -m "commit message here")
7. Push changes to github(git push -u origin your-branch-name)

So those are the steps for contributing on open-source projects. But reading the contributing guidelines of every project before making a new pull request.