Hello Strapi Community!

It’s that time of year again; Open Source, Pull Requests, and T-shirts (or trees)… You probably guessed it, I am talking about Hacktoberfest.

For those of you who haven’t heard about it yet, Hacktoberfest is an international online festival to promote Open Source Software. Every year throughout the month of October you can participate in this huge festival and get rewarded to contribute to any Open Source project on Github.

Hacktoberfest is the perfect moment to contribute, whether you are an experienced OS contributor or a first-timer. And the Strapi repository is open to Hacktoberfest contributions, that’s the occasion to become an official Strapi contributor.

What is Hacktoberfest

Any PR that you make between October 1st and 31st can qualify you to get a reward from Digital Ocean, the organizer of Hacktoberfest. If you got 4 of your Pull Requests accepted by repositories maintainers, you can get a t-shirt or can decide to plant a tree. Pretty nice!

Learn more on the Hacktoberfest official website!

Of course, Hacktoberfest is about more than just winning a t-shirt, it is about being part of an enormous worldwide community interested in participating in the development of the Open Source philosophy. For maintainers this is great, it is the perfect time to share more information about your project and to discuss with people interested in it.

To participate, as a developer, you just have to register for the event with your Github account on the Hacktoberfest website. You’ll then access a dashboard where you can see your PRs status (submitted, accepted, rejected, etc.). The tracking is automatic.

Before telling you more about what we are doing at Strapi for this event, let’s take a minute to go over the Hacktoberfest values.

• Everyone is welcome!
• Quantity is fun, quality is key.
• Short-term action, long-term impact.

We totally share these values here at Strapi and count on you to respect them :) Hacktoberfest is about having fun, contributing to the projects you care about, and learning. We want everyone to enjoy themselves and will be ensuring that everyone abides by the values.

How to contribute to Strapi during Hacktoberfest

What kind of contributions are accepted

First of all, Strapi being Open Source, you can contribute to it whenever you want, not only in October. At any time, you can find all open issues you can propose a fix to, or give feedback.

For Hacktoberfest we really want to provide a good experience to contributors and to help first-timers open a Pull Request for the first time. As we are still a small team here at Strapi, we will target our effort on some well-identified issues that we will review in priority. Starting October 1st, you’ll be able to identify these issues with the “Hacktoberfest” label. These issues impact different parts of the software and require different skills and knowledge, so everyone should find an interesting issue.

See all the “Hacktoberfest” labeled issues on the Strapi repository

In addition to these issues, we will keep reviewing contributions to the documentation.

The contribution workflow

Now that you know how you can contribute, let’s talk about the workflow to contribute. If you have never opened a pull request on an OS project, no worries.

Here is how it works:

1. First, browse the list of issues labeled “Hacktoberfest”
2. Once you’ve found one that you are interested in, you can let everyone know that you will be working on it in the comments section.
3. Fork the Strapi repo, create a branch, and start working on it.
4. Once you are ready to submit your work, push your branch to the Strapi repo and create a pull request, make sure to mention the issue you’re fixing.
5. The team at Strapi will then review it, and let you know if some modifications are needed.
6. Once everything is good, the team merges the PR and your contribution is taken into account for Hacktoberfest.

We have a document in our repository to give you all the details you will need to open a Pull request, accessible here.

You are not alone

If it is your first time contributing or participating in Hacktoberfest, no worries, you can ask questions on our Slack and our Forum where we created a dedicated topic for Hacktoberfest.

Finally, the team behind Hacktoberfest put up a great number of resources and a nice FAQ, we invite you to have a look at them on their website.

See you on Github and have a good Hacktoberfest!