I recently did a webinar where I talked with two Kestra contributors about their contribution experience. While our discussion was mostly centered around plugins, this reminded me we have multiple ways to contribute to Kestra and I figured I should cover them. While I know there is a big push to contribute during Hacktoberfest, contributions are accepted all year round!
Kestra has several areas or opportunities for contributions, and depending on your expertise, you may find some more interesting than others. We have a general contribution guide that covers the code base and documentation.
Where to start?
Both contributors mentioned started with technology they were already familiar with and looking for issues labeled good first issue. This is such a great strategy because the less you have to learn, the quicker you can get to doing!
Good first issue, at least at the time of writing this post, had a mix of front end, back end, and plugin issues. You may also see some issues for our docs, although most of those tend to be in the docs repo.
Docs
Having fresh eyes on a product and the docs gives you a really great perspective to review for intuitive design, clarity, and overall user experience. As you are reading and using the Kestra docs you may have questions or improvements that you notice. These make great opportunities for creating an issue (particularly if you need to clarify your understanding). If you have questions about documentation, it's entirely likely that others do as well.
We don't often label issues in the docs repo for good first issue but there are a few (at least at the time of writing this).
Plugins
Plugins are the foundation of tasks in Kestra flows and offer integrations outside of Kestra itself. Kestra has an extensive plugin library, but depending on the plugin, it may not offer complete cover of the API. Sometimes this is a bit of a design choice, other times it's simply because there was no use case for that particular endpoint of functionality. Extending the plugin is a great place to contribute.
If you are looking for ways to contribute to plugins, each plugin has it's own repo. You can look for issues there. Some plugin issues are also in the main Kestra repo.
There is also a dedicated plugin developer guide to help you understand the overall plugin landscape.
Blueprints
Seeing things in action with more of an end-to-end example is really helpful in truly understanding how something works. Blueprints combine multiple plugins to accomplish a goal and make it easy to get a flow started.
Find a plugin with no blueprint? This is a great opportunity to create a blueprint yourself. Think of a real world example. Bonus points if you use it when you are done.
Where will you make your first contribution to Kestra?
Photo by Taylor Burnfield on Unsplash