If you ever spot room for improvement or an error in the Rails documentation — and that includes the Rails Guides and the API docs — they’ve made the process extremely easy. If you’ve been waiting for “the right moment” to start contributing to open-source software, this might be it.
The docrails project on Github, has public write-access enabled so that anyone can push documentation fixes.
This Rails blog post goes into full detail on the docrails project, but here’s the short and sweet version:
- Never touch any source code in commits that get pushed to docrails. If you need to change code, make a pull request to the main Rails project. docrails is for changes to RDoc, guides, and README files.
- docrails will occasionally be merged into rails, and vice versa. docrails has maintainers who ensure that no “poor” commits to docrails make it into the rails repo.
- If you’re confident that your documentation fix is an improvement, just push to docrails!
If you want to expand (or just start) your “open-source portfolio,” docrails is a great place to begin.
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