Contributions Welcome!

We welcome contributions to the Hyperledger Project in many forms, and there’s always plenty to do!

First things first, please review the Hyperledger Project’s Code of Conduct before participating. It is important that we keep things civil.

Getting a Linux Foundation account

In order to participate in the development of the Hyperledger Fabric project, you will need an LF account You will need to use your LF ID to grant you access to all the Hyperledger community tools, including Gerrit and Jira.

Setting up your SSH key

For Gerrit, you will want to register your public SSH key. Login to Gerrit with your LF account, and click on your name in the upper right-hand corner and then click ‘Settings’. In the left-hand margin, you should see a link for ‘SSH Public Keys’. Copy-n-paste your public SSH key into the window and press ‘Add’.

Getting help

If you are looking for something to work on, or need some expert assistance in debugging a problem or working out a fix to an issue, our community is always eager to help. We hang out on Slack, IRC (#hyperledger on freenode.net) and the mailing lists. Most of us don’t bite ;-) and will be glad to help.

Requirements and Use Cases

We have a Requirements WG that is documenting use cases and from those use cases deriving requirements. If you are interested in contributing to this effort, please feel free to join the discussion in slack.

Reporting bugs

If you are a user and you find a bug, please submit an issue. Please try to provide sufficient information for someone else to reproduce the issue. One of the project’s maintainers should respond to your issue within 24 hours. If not, please bump the issue and request that it be reviewed.

Fixing issues and working stories

Review the issues list and find something that interests you. You could also check the “help wanted” and “good first bug” lists. It is wise to start with something relatively straight forward and achievable. Usually there will be a comment in the issue that indicates whether someone has already self-assigned the issue. If no one has already taken it, then add a comment assigning the issue to yourself, eg.: I'll work on this issue.. Please be considerate and rescind the offer in comments if you cannot finish in a reasonable time, or add a comment saying that you are still actively working the issue if you need a little more time.

Working with a local clone and Gerrit

We are using Gerrit to manage code contributions. If you are unfamiliar, please review this document before proceeding.

After you have familiarized yourself with Gerrit, and maybe played around with the lf-sandbox project, you should be ready to set up your local development environment We use a Vagrant-based approach to development that simplifies things greatly.

Coding guidelines

Be sure to check out the language-specific style guides before making any changes. This will ensure a smoother review.

Becoming a maintainer

This project is managed under open governance model as described in our charter. Projects or sub-projects will be lead by a set of maintainers. New projects can designate an initial set of maintainers that will be approved by the Technical Steering Committee when the project is first approved. The project’s maintainers will, from time-to-time, consider adding or removing a maintainer. An existing maintainer will post a patchset to the MAINTAINERS file. If a majority of the maintainers concur in the comments, the pull request is then merged and the individual becomes a (or is removed as a) maintainer. Note that removing a maintainer should not be taken lightly, but occasionally, people do move on - hence the bar should be some period of inactivity, an explicit resignation, some infraction of the code of conduct or consistently demonstrating poor judgement.