Thank you for showing interest in contributing to the Mender project. Connecting with contributors and growing a community is very important to us. We hope you will find what you need to get started writing documentation on this page.
Pull requests are very welcome, and the maintainers of Mender work hard to stay on top to review and hopefully merge your work.
If your work is significant, it can make sense to discuss the idea with the maintainers and relevant project members upfront. Start a discussion on our Mender Hub forum.
Mender is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. To ensure open source license compatibility, we need to keep track of the origin of all commits and make sure they comply with this license. To do this, we follow the same procedure as used by the Linux kernel, and ask every commit to be signed off.
The sign-off is a simple line at the end of the explanation for the patch, which certifies that you wrote it or otherwise have the right to pass it on as an open-source commit. The rules are pretty simple: if you can certify the below (from developercertificate.org):
Developer Certificate of Origin
Version 1.1
Copyright (C) 2004, 2006 The Linux Foundation and its contributors.
660 York Street, Suite 102,
San Francisco, CA 94110 USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this
license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1
By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:
(a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I
have the right to submit it under the open source license
indicated in the file; or
(b) The contribution is based upon previous work that, to the best
of my knowledge, is covered under an appropriate open source
license and I have the right under that license to submit that
work with modifications, whether created in whole or in part
by me, under the same open source license (unless I am
permitted to submit under a different license), as indicated
in the file; or
(c) The contribution was provided directly to me by some other
person who certified (a), (b) or (c) and I have not modified
it.
(d) I understand and agree that this project and the contribution
are public and that a record of the contribution (including all
personal information I submit with it, including my sign-off) is
maintained indefinitely and may be redistributed consistent with
this project or the open source license(s) involved.
Then you just add a line to every git commit message:
Signed-off-by: Random J Developer <[email protected]>
Use your real name (sorry, no pseudonyms or anonymous contributions).
If you set your user.name and user.email git configs, you can sign your
commit automatically with git commit -s.
Writing documentation for the Mender project requires that you follow the style guide as outlined in the style guide document.
The project also has a dedicated guide to the CLI and Bash script examples here.
The project has a few tools to help with developing documentation:
- checklinks - Which automatically checks all internal links for duds.
- ./scripts/passive.sh - Checks a document for passive voice.
- ./scripts/weasel.sh - Checks a document for weasel words.
- autoversion.py - Checks the version of a linked external tool.
In an ever more digitized world, securing the world's connected devices is a very important and meaningful task. To succeed, we will need to row in the same direction and work to the best interest of the project.
This project appreciates your friendliness, transparency and a collaborative spirit.