Find a project

First and foremost to contribute to an open source you need to decide on what language you want to work in. After that at least we have something to search for which gives us a sense of direction.

Let's start

1. First, we choose a project we want to contribute.

I've chosen a project I want to contribute, and that is PHPUnit library, you can also navigate to the issues tab and see what you can help with.

2. Find something to fix.

You can either go through open issues or just go into the project and explore where you could improve the code as much as a piece of code moving it out of a big method into a separate method.

3. Fork the repository and clone it in your machine.

To actually start changing things you first need to fork the repo and clone it into your local machine. As you can see I have forked the PHPUnit repo, now I need to clone it and start changing code.

git clone git@github.com:didslm/phpunit.git

4. Do the changes you want to do and push.

Before doing changes, create a new branch

git checkout -b docs-improovements

In this code I have decided I want to improve the class and initialization, you can see it in this Pull-Request.

5. Create the Pull-request but make sure to read the rules if there are any.

After this, some people are going to review and either accept or decline your Pull-request but for the purpose of this article, I will create a pull request like this and send it.

Where to go from here

You can either go on github.com/trending and explore projects that people have created or go to dev.to. I will make a list that you can start working on if you feel positive that you want to do this.

1. PHP project github.com/phpunit
2. PHP project github.com/env
3. GO project github.com/env
4. C++ project github.com/json
5. Learning for begginers project github.com/web-dev-for-begginers
6. PHP project github.com/uuid
7. Docker project github.com/nginx-php

Happy coding 👩🏻‍💻 🧑🏼‍💻