How I added my contribution to the Symfony project
In recent times I’ve started to work on open-source projects. I’ve made some Symfony bundles: check here and here.
The next step was to add my contribution to the Symfony project.
First of all, I checked the issues on Symfony GitHub, and picked the one with the label “Good first issue”. Then I commented on it the following: I would work on it. So the issue was assigned to me from that time.
This issue was a very simple one because it required only some translation verification: https://github.com/symfony/symfony/issues/59417. For the first time, it was the best issue to understand how I could contribute to an open-source project.
The following part contains the main steps of a contribution if you want to do as well.
1. Contribution guide
If you want to contribute to any repository, most of them contain a description of it. It is highly recommended to read it before you start to do anything. Symfony has a very detailed contribution guide.
If you are unsure about something, you can check the other pull requests or issues, and how the other developers do the things. It could help a lot.
2. Fork the project
After you`ve read it, you can start to work on your issue. The first step is to fork the project on GitHub.
You can decide on some details before the creation of the fork. Probably the most important is the last point, where you can choose to fork the entire project, or just the latest branch. It depends on your issue, for example, my target branch was 6.4.
After the forking, you will have your instance from the project under your profile, among your repositories.
3. Coding part — your contribution part
When you have your fork, then you can checkout the project. Create a new branch for your issue, and start to work on it. That is it.
4. Create a pull request for your solution
When you are ready, you can push your code into your repository. You can create a pull request from your repository and set the target to the original project branch/tag.
5. Review and fixes
After you submit the pull request, you can wait for the review by members of the project. Presumably, they will leave some comments to you, questions about your code or to fix something. You don’t need to worry about it. They will appreciate your effort and the help for their project, so do it.
Finally
I hope this article helps you to start contributing to open-source projects. And if you have ideas or requests for any of my bundles, please share them with me. I would develop these according to needs.
