Getting Started With Open Source -Part 1

Students especially first year and second-year grads find it tough to start their contributions in open source. The article will help students in making open source contributions.

Let’s Get Started :

Step 1:

Finding the language in which you are expert. Even if you have little experience, choose the language about which you know something.

Step 2:

Choosing open source organizations. Head over to Google Summer of Code organization page.

Step 3:

Here you will see multiple organizations. You can select one of organization and view their required languages. Just like you can select FOSSASIA, my favorite organization. You can view past projects for starting your contributions.

Mostly all open source organization uses Github for maintaining their Codebase. For Fossasia you can head over to https://github.com/fossasia . Select your preferred language.

You will see results somewhat like this.

Select any of the projects you find interesting. I am selecting Susi_firefoxbot present in results. Here comes the codebase of the project.

The workflow for contribution is

Fork the project.

Clone your forked repository.

For cloning your repository using type in terminal

git clone https://github.com/sk9331657/susi_chromebot.git

Contribution can be major of two types :

1. Feature Request — In this, you suggest a new feature in the current application.
2. Bug Report — In this, you encounter a new bug and solve it.

For already present issues you can head over to issues claimed in the project. Claim any issue by messaging in the form of comments to issues. Once you get the instruction, you can move ahead to form the pull request.

For example: For given first issue in the image , I will make a pull request.

Open the cloned code in Microsoft VS. You Window will look like this.

So explaining the issue, we have to add a button for login page in the settings page. We will make a branch for solving this issue with the name — Fix-505 by typing in the integrated terminal :

git branch Fix-505

and now move to that branch using

git checkout Fix-505

To check the current branch type:

git status

I have made required changes for issues. We can see Changes in Source Control like it showing 1 changes.

Before pushing the changes we need to commit them. We add commit message and click commit icon(tick icon).

We will now push our branch to your forked repo using

git push origin Fix-505

and create a pull request to main repo from there.

Once you push your branch. You will notice your push update like this :

Compare and pull request to create your first pull request. Once you create pull request project maintainers, review your request and merges it in case it is perfect. Similarly, you can contribute in as many as projects you can work.

Hope this article help you out. In case of any query ping me Shubham Kumar on Github.

Shubham Kumar

Github : https://github.com/sk9331657