Thank you for your interest in contributing to Rust! There are many ways to contribute, and we appreciate all of them. This document is a bit long, so here's links to the major sections:
If you have questions, please make a post on internals.rust-lang.org or hop on #rust-internals.
As a reminder, all contributors are expected to follow our Code of Conduct.
To request a change to the way that the Rust language works, please open an issue in the RFCs repository rather than this one. New features and other significant language changes must go through the RFC process.
While bugs are unfortunate, they‘re a reality in software. We can’t fix what we don‘t know about, so please report liberally. If you’re not sure if something is a bug or not, feel free to file a bug anyway.
If you have the chance, before reporting a bug, please search existing issues, as it‘s possible that someone else has already reported your error. This doesn’t always work, and sometimes it‘s hard to know what to search for, so consider this extra credit. We won’t mind if you accidentally file a duplicate report.
Opening an issue is as easy as following this link and filling out the fields. Here‘s a template that you can use to file a bug, though it’s not necessary to use it exactly:
<short summary of the bug> I tried this code: <code sample that causes the bug> I expected to see this happen: <explanation> Instead, this happened: <explanation> ## Meta `rustc --version --verbose`: Backtrace:
All three components are important: what you did, what you expected, what happened instead. Please include the output of rustc --version --verbose, which includes important information about what platform you‘re on, what version of Rust you’re using, etc.
Sometimes, a backtrace is helpful, and so including that is nice. To get a backtrace, set the RUST_BACKTRACE environment variable. The easiest way to do this is to invoke rustc like this:
$ RUST_BACKTRACE=1 rustc ...
Pull requests are the primary mechanism we use to change Rust. GitHub itself has some great documentation on using the Pull Request feature. We use the ‘fork and pull’ model described there.
Please make pull requests against the master branch.
All pull requests are reviewed by another person. We have a bot, @rust-highfive, that will automatically assign a random person to review your request.
If you want to request that a specific person reviews your pull request, you can add an r? to the message. For example, Steve usually reviews documentation changes. So if you were to make a documentation change, add
r? @steveklabnik
to the end of the message, and @rust-highfive will assign @steveklabnik instead of a random person. This is entirely optional.
After someone has reviewed your pull request, they will leave an annotation on the pull request with an r+. It will look something like this:
@bors: r+ 38fe8d2
This tells @bors, our lovable integration bot, that your pull request has been approved. The PR then enters the merge queue, where @bors will run all the tests on every platform we support. If it all works out, @bors will merge your code into master and close the pull request.
Documentation improvements are very welcome. The source of doc.rust-lang.org is located in src/doc in the tree, and standard API documentation is generated from the source code itself.
Documentation pull requests function in the same as other pull requests, though you may see a slightly different form of r+:
@bors: r+ 38fe8d2 rollup
That additional rollup tells @bors that this change is eligible for a ‘rollup’. To save @bors some work, and to get small changes through more quickly, when @bors attempts to merge a commit that‘s rollup-eligible, it will also merge the other rollup-eligible patches too, and they’ll get tested and merged at the same time.
Sometimes, an issue will stay open, even though the bug has been fixed. And sometimes, the original bug may go stale because something has changed in the meantime.
It can be helpful to go through older bug reports and make sure that they are still valid. Load up an older issue, double check that it's still true, and leave a comment letting us know if it is or is not. The least recently updated sort is good for finding issues like this.
There are a number of other ways to contribute to Rust that don't deal with this repository.
Answer questions in #rust, or on users.rust-lang.org, or on StackOverflow.
Participate in the RFC process.
Find a requested community library, build it, and publish it to Crates.io. Easier said than done, but very, very valuable!