Building communities documentation

Learn best practices for moderating and setting up collaborative, safe, and effective communities using GitHub's community-tested tools.

Overview

Recommended

Setting guidelines for repository contributors

You can create guidelines to communicate how people should contribute to your project.

Configuring issue templates for your repository

You can customize the templates that are available for contributors to use when they open new issues in your repository.

Creating a pull request template for your repository

When you add a pull request template to your repository, project contributors will automatically see the template's contents in the pull request body.

Articles

Create issue and pull request templates

About issue and pull request templates

With issue and pull request templates, you can customize and standardize the information you'd like contributors to include when they open issues and pull requests in your repository.
Document your project with wikis

About wikis

You can host documentation for your repository in a wiki, so that others can use and contribute to your project.
Set up your project for contributions

Adding a license to a repository

You can include an open source license in your repository to make it easier for other people to contribute.
Document your project with wikis

Adding or editing wiki pages

You can add and edit wiki pages directly on GitHub or locally using the command line.
Set up your project for contributions

Adding support resources to your project

You can create a SUPPORT file to let people know about ways to get help with your project.
Document your project with wikis

Changing access permissions for wikis

Only repository collaborators can edit a public repository's wiki by default, but you can allow anyone with an account on your GitHub Enterprise Server instance to edit your wiki.
Create issue and pull request templates

Common validation errors when creating issue forms

You may see some of these common validation errors when creating, saving, or viewing issue forms.
Create issue and pull request templates

Configuring issue templates for your repository

You can customize the templates that are available for contributors to use when they open new issues in your repository.
Set up your project for contributions

Creating a default community health file

You can create default community health files, such as CONTRIBUTING and CODE_OF_CONDUCT. Default files will be used for any repository owned by the account that does not contain its own file of that type.
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