Getting Started as a Contributor

We’re always looking for people who want to help out. Here are some tips to getting started. First, get familiar with the information on this page, and the links to the side. In particular, you should look at the discussion pages. There are also Mailing Lists you can join.

Here are some ideas:

• Review and comment on the pull requests on GitHub.
  You can find pull requests -- patches that people have suggested -- at https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pulls. Reviewing and commenting on these is helpful and can be a good way to learn your way around the code.
• Look through the OpenSSL issues on GitHub.
  You can find issues that people have opened at https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues. Sometimes there are open tickets that can be related, it would be good to cross-reference them (so somebody working on one, sees the other). Commentary on the issues is also good. Even just commenting that you think an issue is important is very useful!
• Help update the documentation.
  The documentation has gotten better, but there are still many API's that are not documented. Write a POD page, or report bugs in existing pages. It’s probably better to do a whole bunch of minor edits in one submission.
• Write some test cases.
  Simple stand-alone test programs that exercise various APIs are very useful, and can usually be added to our perl-based test framework pretty easily. Tests of the command-line program are also important, and can be handled by the same framework but might require a bit more digging. We welcome all new test efforts!
• Follow Contributing Steps.
  See the details in CONTRIBUTING.md and then contribute a change to the documentation or software, by opening a pull request.