I built a site where your first open source contribution is adding yourself to it

#opensource #beginners #github #git

Plenty of people never make their first pull request. The commands are rarely the reason. You can learn git add, git commit, and git push in an afternoon. What stops people is that the repo they pick has no reason to care whether they showed up, and nothing visibly changes when they are finished.

So I built FREE-OPEN. It is a small React site, and the contribution is literally you. You fork it, add yourself to one JSON file, and open a pull request. When it is merged, your card appears on the contributors page of the live site. That is the whole thing. No issue to claim, no build system to learn, no review gauntlet waiting for you.

What your first contribution looks like

Fork the repo, clone your fork, and install dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/<YOUR-USERNAME>/FREE-OPEN.git
cd FREE-OPEN
npm install

Create a branch, open src/data/contributors.json, and add yourself to the end of the array:

{
  "name": "Your Full Name",
  "github": "your-github-username",
  "linkedin": "your-linkedin-slug",
  "twitter": "your-twitter-handle"
}

Run npm run dev, check that your card shows up at /contributors, then commit, push, and open the pull request. Once it is merged your card is on the live site.

Why a JSON file

I wanted the first contribution to be as small as possible. Adding one object to one file means you cannot really break anything, and if two people do it at the same time the conflict is a one-line fix. The point is not the JSON. The point is that you run the whole loop once, fork, branch, commit, push, pull request, merge, and then you look at the site and your name is there.

The stack

React 18, Vite, Tailwind CSS, and React Router. Nothing exotic. Vite because the dev server is fast enough that a newcomer does not sit around wondering if something is broken. Tailwind because the site has a dark mode and I did not want to hand-write a second stylesheet. React Router for the contributors and about pages.

What the repo is for

The repo has picked up 19 forks, and it has become a place to practise the boring, real parts of contributing: writing a branch name, writing a commit message that says what you did, writing a PR description that a maintainer can act on. Those are the things that get you through your first job, and you can practise them here without a deadline.

The lesson I keep coming back to is simple. People will contribute if the barrier is one file and the reward is visible. A lot of projects get the first half right and forget the second.

It is not finished

There is a CONTRIBUTING.md, a code of conduct, and issue templates for bugs, features, and improvements, so there is more to do than just add a card. The site itself is plain on purpose. I would rather it stay readable than clever.

Try it

Live site: https://free-open.vercel.app/
Repo: https://github.com/mukuvi/FREE-OPEN

If you have never opened a pull request, this is a good place to start and I will review it. If you maintain a repo and you are trying to get first-timers through the door, take the idea. Make the first step tiny and make the result visible.

Also on DEV: I wrote about ARN.IO, a reading companion that keeps your place and your notes, if you want another look at how I build things end to end.

DEV Community