2.9 KiB
How to Contribute
We love Pull Requests! Your contributions help make ChooseALicense.com great.
Getting Started
So you want to contribute to ChooseALicense. Great! We welcome any help we can get. But first, please make sure you understand what this site is all about. It’s not a comprehensive list of all possible licenses.
Adding a license
Choosealicense.com is intended to demystify license choices, not present all of them. As such, there are several requirements for a license to be listed on the site:
- The license must have an SPDX identifier. If your license isn't registered with SPDX, please request that it be added.
- The license must be listed on one of the following approved lists of licenses:
- List of OSI approved licenses
- GNU's list of free licenses (note: the license must be listed in one of the three "free" categories)
- Open Definition's list of conformant licenses (non-code)
- A GitHub code search must reveal at least 1,000 public repositories using the license
If your proposed license meets the above criteria, here's a few other things to keep in mind as you propose the license's addition:
- Licenses live in the
/_licenses
folder. - The license files should be in the format of
_licenses/[lowercased-spdx-id].txt
(e.g.,_licenses/mit.txt
) - Each license has both required and optional metadata that should be included.
- The text of the license should be wrapped to a 78 character width.
- The body of the file should be the text of the license in plain text.
- Almost without exception, new licenses should be added as hidden (
hidden: true
in the YAML front matter), such that they are directly linkable and detectable, but not otherwise listed.
Making Changes
The easiest way to make a change is to simply edit a file from your browser. When you click the edit button, it will fork the repository under your account. Note what issue/issues your patch fixes in the commit message.
For example, to change this file,
find it in the GitHub repository. Then click the Edit
button. Make your
changes, type in a commit message, and click the Propose File Change
button.
That’s it!
For more advanced changes, check out the bootstrap instructions in the project's readme.
Testing
HTML::Proofer is set up to validate all links within the project. You can run this locally to ensure that your changes are valid:
./script/bootstrap
./script/cibuild