.. _doc_ways_to_contribute:

Ways to contribute
==================

Godot Engine is a non-profit, community-driven free and open source project.
Almost all (but our lead dev Juan, more on that below) developers are working
*pro bono* on their free time, out of personal interest and for the love of
creating a libre engine of exceptional quality.

This means that to thrive, Godot needs as many users as possible to get
involved by contributing to the engine. There are many ways to contribute to
such a big project, making it possible for everybody to bring something
positive to the engine, regardless of their skillset:

-  **Be part of the community.** The best way to contribute to Godot and help
   it become ever better is simply to use the engine and make its promotion by
   word-of-mouth, in-game credits and splash screen, blog posts, tutorials,
   videos, demos, gamedev or free software events, support on the Q&A, IRC,
   forums, Discord, etc.
   Being a user and advocate helps spread the word about our great engine,
   which has no marketing budget and can therefore only rely on its community
   to become more mainstream.

-  **Make games.** That's no secret, to convince new users and especially
   industry players that Godot is a relevant market player, we need great games
   made with Godot. We know that the engine has a lot of potential, both for 2D
   and 3D games, but given its young age we still lack big releases that will
   draw attention to Godot. So keep working on your awesome projects, each new
   game increases our credibility on the gamedev market!

-  **Get involved in the engine's development.** This can be by contributing
   code via pull requests, testing the development snapshots or directly the
   git *master* branch, report bugs or suggest enhancements on the issue
   tracker, improve the official documentation (both the class reference and
   tutorials). The following sections will cover each of those "direct" ways
   of contributing to the engine.

-  **Donate.** Godot is a non-profit project, but it can still benefit from
   user donations for many things. Apart from usual expenses such as hosting
   costs or promotion material on events, we also use donation money to
   acquire hardware when necessary (e.g. we used donation money to buy a
   Macbook Pro to implement Retina/HiDPI support and various other
   macOS-related features).
   Most importantly, we also used donation money to hire our lead developer
   Juan Linietsky, so that he can work full-time on the engine. Even with a low
   monthly wage, we need a steady donation income to continue doing this, which
   has been very beneficial to the project so far. So if you want to donate
   some money to the project, check `our website <http://godotengine.org/donate>`_
   for details.

Contributing code
-----------------

The possibility to study, use, modify and redistribute modifications of the
engine's source code are the fundamental rights that Godot's license grant you,
making it `free and open source software <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software>`_.

As such, everyone is entitled to modify
`Godot's source code <https://github.com/godotengine/godot>`_, and send those
modifications back to the upstream project in the form of a patch (a text file
describing the changes in a ready-to-apply manner) or - in the modern workflow
that we use - via a so-called "pull request" (PR), i.e. a proposal to directly
merge one or more git commits (patches) into the main development branch.

Contributing code changes upstream has two big advantages:

-  Your own code will be reviewed and improved by other developers, and will be
   further maintained directly in the upstream project, so you won't have to
   reapply your own changes every time you move to a newer version. On the
   other hand it comes with a responsability, as your changes have to be
   generic enough to be beneficial to all users, and not just your project; so
   in some cases it might still be relevant to keep your changes only for your
   own project, if they are too specific.

-  The whole community will benefit from your work, and other contributors will
   behave the same way, contributing code that will be beneficial to you. At
   the time of this writing, more than 300 developers have contributed code
   changes to the engine!

To ensure a good collaboration and overall quality, the Godot developers
enforce some rules for code contribution, for example regarding the style to
use in the C++ code (indentation, brackets, etc.) or the git and PR workflow.

.. seealso:: Technical details about the PR workflow are outlined in a
             specific section, :ref:`doc_pr_workflow`.

             Details about the code style guidelines and the ``clang-format``
             tool used to enforce them are outlined in
             :ref:`doc_code_style_guidelines`.

Testing and reporting issues
----------------------------

Another great way of contributing to the engine is to test development releases
or the development branch and to report issues. It is also meaningful to report
issues discovered in so-called stable releases, so that they can be fixed in
the development branch and in future maintenance releases.

Testing development versions
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To help with the testing, you have several possibilities:

-  Compile the engine from source yourself, following the instructions of the
   :ref:`Compiling <toc-devel-compiling>` page for your platform.

-  Test official pre-release binaries when they are announced (usually on the
   blog and other community platforms), such as alpha, beta and RC (release
   candidate) builds.

-  Test "trusted" unofficial builds of the development branch; just ask
   community members for reliable providers. Whenever possible, it's best to
   use official binaries or to compile yourself though, to be sure about the
   provenance of your binaries.

As mentioned previously, it is also meaningful to keep your eyes peeled for
potential bugs that might still be present in the stable releases, especially
when using some niche features of the engine which might get less testing by
the developers.

Filing an issue on GitHub
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Godot uses `GitHub's issue tracker <https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues>`_
for bug reports and enhancement suggestions. You will need a GitHub account to
be able to open a new issue there, and click on the "New issue" button.

When you report a bug, you should keep in mind that the process is very similar
to an appointment with your doctor. You noticed *symptoms* that make you think
that something might be wrong (the engine crashes, some features don't work as
expected, etc.). It's the role of the bug triaging team and the developers to
then help make the diagnosis of the issue you met, so that the actual cause of
the bug can be identified and addressed.

You should therefore always ask yourself: what are the relevant information to
give so that other Godot contributors can understand the bug, identify it and
hopefully fix it. Here are some of the most important infos that you should
always provide:

-  **Operating system.** Sometimes bugs are system-specific, i.e. they happen
   only on Windows, or only on Linux, etc. That's particularly relevant for all
   bugs related to OS interfaces, such as file management, input, window
   management, audio, etc.

-  **Godot version.** This is a must have. Some issues might be relevant in the
   current stable release, but fixed in the development branch, or the other
   way around. You might also be using an obsolete version of Godot and
   experiencing a known issue fixed in a later version, so knowing this from
   the start helps to speed up the diagnosis.

-  **How to reproduce the bug.** In the majority of cases, bugs are
   reproducible, i.e. it is possible to trigger them reliably by following some
   steps. Please always describe those steps as clearly as possible, so that
   everyone can try to reproduce the issue and confirm it. Ideally, make a demo
   project that reproduces this issue out of the box, zip it and attach it to
   the issue (you can do this by drag and drop).
   Even if you think that the issue is trivial to reproduce, adding a minimal
   project that lets reproduce it is a big added value. You have to keep in
   mind that there are thousands of issues in the tracker, and developers can
   only dedicate little time to each issue.

When you click the "New issue" button, you should be presented with a text area
prefilled with our issue template. Please try to follow it so that all issues
are consistent and provide the required information.

Contributing to the documentation
---------------------------------

There are two separate resources referred to as "documentation" in Godot:

-  **The class reference.** This is the documentation for the complete Godot
   API as exposed to GDScript and the other scripting languages. It can be
   consulted offline, directly in Godot's code editor, or online at
   :ref:`Godot API <toc-class-ref>`.
   To contribute to the class reference, you have to edit the
   `doc/base/classes.xml` in Godot's git repository, and make a pull request.
   See :ref:`doc_updating_the_class_reference` for more details.

-  **The tutorials and engine documentation.** This is the part you are reading
   now, which is distributed in the HTML, PDF and EPUB formats. Its contents
   are generated from plain text files in the reStructured Text (rst) format,
   to which you can contribute via pull requests on the
   `godot-docs <https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs>`_ GitHub repository.
   See :ref:`doc_documentation_guidelines` for more details.
