Contribute to open source in the Hacktoberfest event as a participant

Chay Auker
3 min readOct 15, 2021

I recently joined Hacktoberfest 2021. I would say it’s a really good event for new developers to join. The purpose of Hacktoberfest event is to participate with the open source community.

Here is how to join the Hacktoberfest and contribute to open source.

1. Sign up to join Hacktoberfest

Click this link to join the Hacktoberfest. You have the options to choose either signup with Github or GitLab.

2. Find the repositories you are interested in

In this step, you need to search for repositories that have the label “hacktoberfest”. Go to the issues tab, then make sure the issues you want to work on have the label “hacktoberfest”.

3. Making contribution to open source

I want to explain how I contributed to the repositories. In case, the beginners are not sure how to do it.

Step 1 — Fork the repository from the project you want to contribute to

Click Fork to copy the project to our GitHub. This allows us to make changes and not affect the original repository.

Step — 2 Clone the project to the local machine

Click Code then click copy to clipboard icon to copy and paste on terminal.

Please refer to this documentation for how to Fork and clone: Fork and Clone

So now we can start making some changes and have fun with creativity and coding.

Step 3 — Create a new branch to your repository

When you finish the code and want to push to your repository, you can simply create a new branch and switch at the same time as follows:

git checkout -b "<new-branch>"example: git checkout -b "feature/registration-form"

Please refer to this documentation how to create a new branch: Git Checkout

Step 4 — Push the code to your repository

It’s time to push the code to your repository as follows:

It’s a good thing to check before pushing the code by using the git status command to check the branch or files you’re working on.

git statusgit add .
git commit -m "add registration form to the register page"
git push origin feature/registration-form

Before you push your code, please make sure that you pull the code from the original repo by referring to this link https://levelup.gitconnected.com/how-to-update-fork-repo-from-original-repo-b853387dd471

Step 5 — Create a pull request

Now we have to create a pull request and then wait until the maintainer merges your code. You have now finished contribution for the Hacktoberfest. Yay!

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