How to start contributing

Thank you for your interest in contributing to Rust! There are many ways to contribute, and we appreciate all of them. This document describes how you can get in touch with other Rust contributors and start contributing to Rust projects.

As a reminder, all contributors are expected to follow our Code of Conduct.

Asking Questions

First, if you have any questions regarding your potential contributions, you can ask other contributors on the following places:

• Rust Zulip server is the primary communication space for most Rust teams and contributors. It is also a great place to observe on what is going on.
  • You can check out e.g. the compiler team (t-compiler) Zulip “channel”
• internals.rust-lang.org (IRLO) is a forum for discussing development of Rust.
• Rust Discord can be used to ask about Rustup contributions in the #wg-rustup channel.

See also the list of teams and working groups and the Community page on the official website for more resources.

Please ask questions! A lot of people report feeling that they are “wasting expert time”, but we do not feel that way. Contributors are important to us.

How to start contributing?

The Rust project is quite large and it can be difficult to know which parts of the project need help, or are a good starting place for beginners. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of rust-lang projects that could serve as starting places for you to contribute. Some of them have contributor guides and issues that are marked as needing help or being good first issues.

If you want to get inspired, check all the rust-lang repositories!

Different kinds of contributions

There are various ways in which you can contribute to Rust projects:

• Writing code is the most obvious one. However, it does not have to be only in Rust! Even though most of our projects are of course written in Rust, we also use other technologies. For example, you can help improve our GitHub CI workflows, automation Python scripts or contribute to web frontends with HTML/CSS/JS (e.g. Rustdoc or Benchmark suite website). Play to your strengths!
• Improving documentation is possibly one of the easiest starting points for contributions. Did you find a typo, something that was unclear, or do you miss some useful information on this page, elsewhere in the Forge or in some other Rust (user-facing) documentation? Great, then send a pull request and you’ll become a contributor! :)
• Improving tests is also very valuable, as there is never enough of them. This can include also documenting existing tests or writing tests for already fixed issues that lack a proper test.
• You can also help with improving issue trackers of our repositories, by helping with triaging issues or by reproducing old issues to find out whether they are still valid or not.
• Or, if you like programming language discussions, you could participate in our RFC process.
• You can also answer questions to help other Rust users, in the Get Help! channels on the Rust Discord server, on users.rust-lang.org (URLO), or on StackOverflow.