Tips and Tricks to Finding Issues to Contribute to on Github

#opensource #beginners #tutorial #tipsandtricks

Want to start contributing to open source? Here is a quick primer on how to find issues to work on in GitHub.

Head over to Github Issues Page. By default this is going to show you your open issues. Look in the search bar and you'll see all the default qualifiers. Mine looks like this: is:open is:issue author:ignoreintuition archived:false
Create a set of filters to limit the result to projects you might be interested in working on. Search for issues that are unassigned, recently updated, and based on the language of your choice:is:open is:issue is:public no:assignee language:javascript archived:false updated:>=2018-06-01
Next we can limit it to certain tags or keywords. Tags are useful for things like finding issues that are good for beginners or where the author is actively seeking help:is:open is:issue is:public no:assignee language:javascript archived:false label:"help wanted" updated:>=2018-06-01
Lastely we want to sort our results. You can sort by the number of interactions or when it was authored:is:open is:issue is:public no:assignee language:javascript archived:false label:"help wanted" updated:>=2018-06-01 sort:interactions-desc

Documentation for all of the qualifiers can be found here. Hopefully, this will help you track down issues that you can work on and get you started with working on some cool new open source projects.

Top comments (8)

Michael Herold • Aug 19 '18

Those are some nice tips! I wish there was a little more standardization across projects for the "help wanted" label because it can take some hunting to pick the right label using this strategy.

If you're interested in being prompted with a list of possible things to look at Code Triage is a nice little application that sends you undocumented methods and/or open issues to triage. You can set how much you would like it to send you every day.

Brian Greig • Aug 19 '18

Agreed. It is hardly a science and it can be a daunting task. We need all the tools we can get. Thanks for the link to CT. Will definitely check it out.