Hacktoberfest is the easiest way to get into open source! Hacktoberfest is a month-long festival of open source code presented by Digital Ocean and DEV this year in 2021.

During the entire month of October 2021, all you have to do is contribute to any open-source projects and open at least 4 pull requests. Yes, any project and any kind of contribution. It can be a bug fix, improvement, or even a documentation change! And win a T-Shirt and awesome stickers.

If you’ve never contributed to open source before, this is the perfect time to get started because Hacktoberfest provides a large list of available contribution opportunities (and yes, there are always plenty for beginners too).

Why Should I Contribute?

CHOOSE TREES OR TEES

Rather than receive t-shirts as swag, you can choose to have a tree planted in your name and help make Hacktoberfest 2021 more carbon neutral.

So, yes! You can win a T-Shirt and few awesome stickers to attach to your laptop. On plus side, you will get into the beautiful world of open source and get international exposure.

Hacktoberfest rules to follow

• The pull request must contain commits you made yourself.

• If a maintainer reports your pull request as spam, it will not be counted toward your participation in Hacktoberfest.

• If a maintainer reports behavior that’s not in line with the project’s code of conduct, you will be ineligible to participate.

• A pull request is considered approved once it has an overall approving review from maintainers, or has been merged by maintainers, or has been given the 'hacktoberfest-accepted' label.

Getting started

STEP 1 - After signing up on hacktoberfest's website with your GitHub or git lab account, go to github search for a project in GitHub you will like to contribute to you can search for the label good-first-issue for beginner friendly projects

STEP 2 - Check for open issues and ask the maintainer of the repository to assign the issue to you, when it is assigned to you, you can then move to the next step.

STEP 3 - Fork this repository (Click the Fork button in the top right of this page, click your Profile Image)

STEP 4 - Clone your fork down to your local machine

git clone https://github.com/your-username/hacktoberfest.git

STEP 5 - Create a branch

git checkout -b branch-name

STEP 6 -Make the changes stated in the issue assigned to you

STEP 7 -Commit and push

git add .
git commit -m 'Commit message'
git push origin branch-name

Congratulations if you follow through the above steps correctly you have successfully contributed to an open-source project.

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