How to Contribute

So you want to contribute to libp2p and the peer-to-peer ecosystem? Here is a quick listing of things we need help with and how you can get started. Even if what you want to do is not listed here, we probably accept contributions for it! If you’re unsure, please open a issue.

Areas of contribution

Code

libp2p and its sister-projects are big, with lots of code written in multiple languages. We always need help writing and maintaining code, but it can be daunting to just jump in. We use the label “Help Wanted” on features or bugfixes that people can help out with. They are an excellent place for you to start contributing code.

The biggest and most active repositories we have today are:

  • https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p
  • https://github.com/libp2p/js-libp2p
  • https://github.com/libp2p/rust-libp2p

The repos above are the main “entry points” for the three most mature libp2p implementations, but there are also many “module repos” which define interfaces and implement various aspects of libp2p for each language. The “entry point” repos will have more information on the modules and repo structure for each language implementation.

Documentation

With lots of code comes the need for lots of good documentation! However, we need a lot more help to write the awesome docs the project needs. If writing technical documentation is your area, we’d absolutely love your help!

The best place to get started is by looking through the Github Issues at: https://github.com/libp2p/docs

Writing new docs is not the only way to help! By filing new documentation issues, you help us get a clearer picture of where the gaps are and what we need to prioritize going forward. If you want your pain-points on our radar, please let us know!

Support

libp2p already has lots of users and curious people experimenting and using libp2p in their applications. These users sometimes get stuck or have questions that need answering. If you’ve contributed something with code or documentation, chances are that you can probably help a lot of people with their questions.

We do most support via the libp2p discussion forums, with libp2p-specific topic tagged with the libp2p tag.

Testing

We’re continuously improving libp2p every day, but mistakes can happen and we could release something that doesn’t work as well as it should — or simply doesn’t work at all! If you like to dig into edge-cases or write testing scenarios, wrangling our testing infrastructure could be the job for you.

We use both Circle CI and Travis for continuous integration, and we’re currently building out a “test lab” for testing large-scale system interactions.

We’d be thrilled if you’d like to contribute, whether by improving our CI infrastructure, adding or fixing test cases, or simply raising issues to highlight things that would make our testing strategy more comprehensive and reliable.

Design

Network stacks need designers too! There are many small places throughout all our projects that could use your design love.

We currently don’t have a single place for this. If you’d like to start it, please let us know

Issues / Triaging

With lots of code come lots of Github Issues. We need YOU to help with organizing all of this in some manner. We don’t yet have any proper resources for getting started with this. Get in touch if you can contribute a sense of extreme organization!

We currently don’t have a single place for this. If you’d like to start it, please let us know

Community

If interacting with people is your favorite thing to do in this world, libp2p and co. are always happy to help you organize events and/or workshops to teach and explore libp2p.

We have a repository (https://github.com/libp2p/community) for organizing community events and would love your help to have meetups in more locations or make the existing ones more regular.

Applications

libp2p is designed for others to build applications with! Building applications and services using libp2p is an excellent way to find use cases where libp2p doesn’t yet do a perfect job or uncover bugs and inefficiencies.

Protocol Design

libp2p is ultimately about building better protocols, and we always welcome ideas and feedback on how to improve those protocols. Feedback, issues, and proposals are all welcome in the specs repo.

Research

Finally, we see Protocol Labs as a research lab, where YOUR ideas can become technologies that have a real impact on the world. If you’re interested in contributing to our research, please reach out to research@protocol.ai for more information. Include what your interests are so we can make sure you get to work on something fun and valuable.

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