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About contributing to GitHub Docs

In this article

You can contribute to GitHub Docs content in several ways.

Articles in the "Contributing to GitHub Docs" section refer to the documentation itself and are a resource for GitHub staff and open source contributors.

GitHub documentation is open source. Anyone can contribute to the docs in the public docs repository: https://github.com/github/docs. GitHub employees work on the documentation in a copy of this repository called docs-internal. The two repositories are automatically synced to keep them both up to date with changes merged into the main branch of either repository. For simplicity, we'll refer to "the documentation repository" in the articles about contributing to GitHub Docs.

The documentation repository is the place to discuss and collaborate on the documentation that is published here on docs.github.com.

Discussions

Discussions are where we have conversations.

If you'd like help troubleshooting a documentation issue or pull request you're working on, have a great new idea for documentation, or want to share something amazing you've learned in our docs, join us in the docs repository discussions.

Note: To preserve the bandwidth of the Docs team, off-topic conversations will be closed.

Issues

Issues are used to track tasks that contributors can help with. If an issue has a triage label, we haven't reviewed it yet, and you shouldn't begin work on it.

If you've found something in the documentation content, or something about the docs.github.com website, that should be updated, search the open issues to see if someone else has reported the same thing. If it's something new, open an issue using a template. We'll use the issue to have a conversation about the problem you'd like to be fixed.

Note: GitHub employees should open issues in the private docs-content repository.

Pull requests

A pull request is a way to suggest changes in our repository. When we merge those changes, they're deployed to the live site within 24 hours.

We cannot accept contributions to the REST API reference documentation. If you spot an inaccuracy in the REST API reference documentation, open an issue in the rest-api-description repository.

We only document GitHub products, features, tools, and extensions. We do not document third-party tools or integrations unless they were codeveloped with GitHub.

Reviewing your own pull requests

You should always review your own pull request first, before marking it as ready for review by others.

For content changes, make sure that you:

  • Confirm that the changes meet the user experience and goals outlined in the content design plan (if there is one).
  • Review the content for technical accuracy.
  • Check your changes for grammar, spelling, and adherence to the Style guide.
  • Make sure the text in your pull request will be easy to translate. For more information, see "Writing content to be translated."
  • Check new or updated Liquid statements to confirm that versioning is correct. For more information, see "Versioning documentation."
  • Check the preview of any pages you have changed. A preview is automatically generated after you submit a pull request and links are added to the pull request. The preview sometimes takes several minutes before it is ready to view. Confirm that everything is rendering as expected. Checking the preview will help you identify problems such as typos, content that doesn't follow the style guide, or content that isn't rendering due to versioning problems. Make sure to check the rendered output for lists and tables, which can sometimes have problems that are difficult to identify in the Markdown.
  • If there are any failing checks in your pull request, troubleshoot them until they're all passing.

Support

We are a small team working hard to keep up with the documentation demands of a continuously changing product. Unfortunately, we just can't help with support questions in this repository. If you are experiencing a problem with GitHub, unrelated to our documentation, please contact GitHub Support directly. Any issues, discussions, or pull requests opened in the documentation repository requesting support will be given information about how to contact GitHub Support, then closed and locked.

If you're having trouble with your GitHub account, contact Support.

Translations

This website is internationalized and available in multiple languages. The source content in this repository is written in English. We automate translations through an internal process, working with professional translators to localize the English content.

If you spot a translation error, please raise an issue with the details.

We do not currently accept pull requests for translated content.

Site policy

GitHub's site policies are also published on docs.github.com.

If you find a typo in the site policy section, you can open a pull request to fix it. For anything else, see "Contributing" in the site-policy repository.