Contributing to Gatsby

Thanks for being interested in contributing to Gatsby. We’re glad you want to join this community! Open source doesn’t always have the best reputation for being friendly and welcoming, and that makes us sad. Everyone belongs in open source, and Gatsby is dedicated to making you feel welcome.

All contributions are welcome, including issues, contributing code, new docs as well as updates and tweaks, blog posts, helping out people, and more. Continue reading to learn what the community can do for you and what you can do for the community. By contributing to open source projects you can connect with people, learn new skills, become a subject-matter expert, and apply all learnings to your own projects.

Resources

Code of conduct

In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, we as contributors and maintainers pledge to make participation in our project and our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, disability, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, level of experience, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.

Read the full code of conduct.

Gatsby news

• Follow Gatsby and Gatsby Changelog on Twitter
• Read and discuss about Request for Comment (RFC) proposals
• Watch videos on Gatsby’s YouTube channel to see past GatsbyConf presentations and tutorial walkthroughs
• Follow the official blog

Get support

• Discord Chat: Real time chat with community & team members. Let’s chat!
• GitHub Discussions: Best place to ask and discuss longer questions about Gatsby and its ecosystem.
  • Feature Requests: Here’s also where you can post your feature requests.
• GitHub Issues: Have you found a bug or a problem in our documentation? Open an issue!
• Stack Overflow: Many members of the community use Stack Overflow to ask questions. Read through the existing questions tagged with gatsby or ask your own.

Ecosystem

• Gatsby User Collective: The Gatsby User collective’s goal is to democratize the maintenance of community plugins to allow more folks to assist in their maintenance and to create higher quality plugins in the Gatsby ecosystem.

Style guide

Read the Gatsby Style Guide to learn more about contributing to our documentation. These detailed requirements will make it more likely your contribution is accepted with minimal changes.

How to contribute

We want contributing to Gatsby to be fun, enjoyable, and educational for anyone and everyone. If you’re interested in participating in the Gatsby community, contributions go far beyond pull requests and commits. We are thrilled to receive a variety of other contributions and as our way of saying “thank you” to our contributors, all contributors are eligible for free Gatsby swag — whether you’re contributing code, docs, a talk, an article, or something else that helps the Gatsby community. Learn how to claim free swag for contributors.

Help fellow users

Answering questions for fellow Gatsby users on Discord or GitHub Discussions are valuable contributions. You can also help out users on issues and Pull Requests to contribute or fix their issues.

Contribute documentation

You can help make the docs awesome. We strive to create inclusive, comprehensive, and enjoyable documentation for our users and everyone can help! Found a typo or an incorrect code example? Put up a PR! Found a better way to explain a concept? Put up a PR! Contributions to our documentation are valuable and greatly appreciated. Visit the Docs Contributions Overview to learn more about our style guide, the documentation structure, and how to write docs.

Contribute code

Contributing bug fixes or new features are the most direct form of contribution you can make. The Gatsby monorepo consists of many interconnected pieces and thus it can be difficult to get started. Read the code contributions guide to learn how to set up the repository locally, how to contribute to the ecosystem, and how to create a Pull Request. Please note that our governance model lays out in what areas of the codebase we accept contributions and which are mostly reserved to core team members.

Share (and build) your experience

There are a few other ways of contributing to the Gatsby ecosystem:

• Contribute to Gatsby’s blog. Want to write about Gatsby? Read the blog contributions doc to get your blog post onto gatsbyjs.com.
• Develop learning materials. Strengthen your expertise by writing a blog post, developing a workshop, creating video tutorials, or present your knowledge as a presentation on meetups and conferences.
• Create a plugin. Learn how to create a plugin and submit it to the Plugin Library.
• Contribute to the Gatsby User Collective. Interested in working on plugins that benefit the whole community? You can find them in the Gatsby User Collective repository.
• Create a Gatsby starter. Created a starter? Share it with the community and submit it to the Starter Library.

Help triage issues

Triaging an issue means gathering missing information, running the given reproduction, verifying the issue’s validity, and investigating the root cause of the issue. You don’t have to triage an issue with the goal of fixing it (although it would certainly be much appreciated) but sharing the results of your investigation can already save us a ton of time.

Benefits of contributing to Open Source

There are many reasons to contribute to Gatsby and open source software in general. Here are some of the benefits of participating:

• Growing your community. Working with Gatsby in open source can connect you with people working on similar things. You can get help or give help, and you might even make an IRL acquaintance! It has happened.

• Improving your skills. When you work on a Gatsby issue or pull request, inevitably you’ll learn more about how something works in the project; either by asking questions and gathering info or by digging deeper into the code yourself. There’s a skill-building benefit to contributing to OSS!

• Getting free swag! By participating in the repo on GitHub, you can become eligible for free swag that the Gatsby team offers as a way to say thank you. With 5 contributions, you can advance to a second level with even more swag options! Learn more about this sweet swag deal.

• Becoming an expert. You might start off totally new to a project like Gatsby or React.js, and by building things and opening issues when you encounter a new challenge or a bug, you’ll learn a ton over time. Staying current with your favorite framework through its open source repo can also give you a leading edge on forthcoming changes. Eventually, you could find your knowledge of said project has grown so much that you’ve become an expert. Celebrate by updating your résumé!

• Speaking at conferences. With those skills you’ve earned yourself working in open source, why not share that knowledge with the world? Web platform conferences the world over are continually looking for speakers and fresh takes on popular topics. Did you build something with Gatsby that you’re excited about? The industry would love to hear from you!

There are undoubtedly more benefits than those listed here. Has Gatsby and open source software made your life better somehow? We’d love to hear about it. Reach out to us on Twitter!