Getting your project contribution-ready

Everyone's working as a team on the same code repository, so you'll definitely need some standards to keep everyone in line! Here's our current thoughts on getting your git project contribution-ready 🏃‍♂️

Set some git groundrules

On committing, branching, and PRs

This is a neat, all-in-one guide inspired by Bits of Good's building process. These were informed both by industry experience and popular blog posts, so these suggestions shouldn't shock you too much!

Git + GitHub Best Practices for Teams (Opinionated)

A quickie on commit message prefixes

Nationals has been trying out this system on the homepage project, and it's been great for commit readability! Since it's such a short gist, we'll embed it here ✨

https://gist.github.com/joshbuchea/6f47e86d2510bce28f8e7f42ae84c716

Create a `CONTRIBUTING.md`

Mozilla's guide

Nothing beats some good documentation. Though it may feel "forced," describing contribution rules is a great way to set expectations for project teams (especially on project hand-off and open sourcing!)

Wrangling Web Contributions: How to Build a CONTRIBUTING.md

An example from Bits of Good

You can also use this as a place to describe the weirder parts of your codebase. Here, you can explain project-specific decisions you want new members to know about. It's also a chance to link to learning resources and guides for everyone to better understand the tech stack.