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Dunsin
Dunsin

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at favour.dev

The Ultimate beginners guide to open source – part 3: ways to find open source projects to contribute to

Most people have no idea where to look for open source projects to contribute to. In this blog, I'll discuss the methods I utilize and play around with to find projects on GitHub.

First way: Go to github.com/search to find specific repositories on GitHub. There, you can organize repositories by stars, language, forks, and most recently updated date. Simply click on the “prefixes” option in the Page to get a list of search prefixes for more advanced searches.

Example:

Image of the github search page

This provides projects written in JavaScript, has between 300 and 1000 stars, and was last updated on September 1st, 2023. If you want to find react projects or with a keyword that isn’t a language, you can use “topic:react”.

Second way: You can also find projects through GitHub issues. Go to github.com/issues and, similar to the search function, you can filter all issues ever created on GitHub based on whether they are open, have a specified label, and the language they are written in.

Example:
input the following: is:open is:issue archived:false label:Hacktoberfest language:typescript -author:[your-github-username]

Image of example of all issues

Third way: go to github.com, click on filter, and then select repositories and recommendations. GitHub will recommend repositories that they think you will be interested in. If you also select repository activity, you will be able to see what the people you follow on GitHub are contributing to, and you can then check out those projects.

Github home page with the filters in place

Thanks for reading, let me know what you think about this and if you would like to see more, if you think i made a mistake or missed something, don't hesitate to comment

Check out Part 2 on how to contribute to a project without feeling scared and Part 1 on the basics of open source.

Top comments (2)

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tyler36 profile image
tyler36

I would also mention hacktoberfest in October. Encourages people to submit quality PRs to open source projects, and some sites even offer prizes.

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dunsincodes profile image
Dunsin

Totally Forgot about Hacktoberfest. Thanks for that awesome addition