For the past seven years, @DigitalOcean has hosted Hacktoberfest: a community-wide celebration of open source.

Here's how to participate and a few details:

• Sign up to participate
• Make at least four pull requests (PRs).
• PRs can be made in any participating GitHub-hosted repository/project
• Your PRs will count toward your participation if they are in a repo with the hacktoberfest topic and once they have been merged, approved by a maintainer, or labeled as hacktoberfest-accepted.
• Maintainers can opt-in to participate by classifying their projects with the hacktoberfest topic (find a list of opted-in projects here )
• Any PR with the hacktoberfest-accepted label, submitted to any public GitHub repository, with or without the hacktoberfest topic, will be considered valid.

* Updated October 5

Before diving into the fun, please read our note about PR etiquette to ensure that you're making meaningful and valuable contributions this month.

Through your participation, you'll boost your open source cred and possibly earn some awesome Hacktoberfest rewards. We’re particularly excited that Hacktoberfest is offering a plant-a-tree alternative prize for those who want to forgo a shirt in favor of helping the planet. 💚

DEV is proud to be a co-host of Hacktoberfest for the second year in a row! That means when you get your SWAG pack, it will include DEV prizes, too! You'll also get a special Hacktoberfest 2020 badge for your DEV profile when you complete those four valid PRs.

Read on for more details.

Contents:

• How to celebrate Hacktoberfest on DEV
• Creating a listing for your Hacktoberfest event
• Forem/DEV Weekly Twitch events
• Progress, discussion, and help threads
• Open Forem issues
• Please Read: Notes on proper Hacktoberfest contributor etiquette

⭐ Share your Hacktoberfest Journey on DEV

We will be paying special attention to Hacktoberfest content that is published here on DEV and using the #hacktoberfest tag frequently ourselves.

Wondering what kind of Hacktoberfest post to share on DEV? Click here for a Hacktoberfest post template where you can choose between these ideas — or write an entirely different type of Hacktoberfest post!

We can't wait to read your stories on which projects you participated in, what issues you ran into and how you solved the bug or built the feature! Posts that help guide other contributors are especially encouraged. ❤️

⭐ DEV Listings for Hacktoberfest Events

In a pre-COVID world, Hacktoberfest included real-life meetups (remember those?). While that's not an option this year, there are plenty of virtual gatherings for both contributors and maintainers celebrating Hacktoberfest. Tell us about yours (and include a registration link) via DEV Listings!

Create a DEV listing for your event

⭐ Join DEV/Forem on Twitch

Throughout Hacktoberfest, we'll be livestreaming on Twitch on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays! Follow us on Twitch at twitch.tv/thepracticaldev to be notified when a stream begins. For reference, here's the schedule breakdown:

• Mondays @ 5 PM UTC: Community gratitude & contributor shoutouts @coffeecraftcode and @nickytonline
• Tuesdays @ 2 PM UTC: Live-coding and Forem project overviews with @nickytonline, special guests, and the raise.dev team
• Thursdays @ 5 PM UTC: Pair-programming with @nickytonline

Stay tuned for weekly posts previewing the Monday stream and recapping the Tuesday+Thursday streams on DEV! 👾

⭐ Find a project, share a project!

Whether you are a contributor or maintainer, our Hacktoberfest project thread is a great place to surface your project for Hacktoberfest participants or find one to work on:

Hacktoberfest 2020 — Who's looking for contributors?

dev.to staff for The DEV Team ・ Sep 17 '20

#hacktoberfest #opensource #discuss #contributorswanted

As a contributor, it’s important to do your research on what projects are actively looking for contributions and this thread is a resource for that.

As a maintainer, be sure to[add hacktoberfest as a topic to your repo in order to opt-in for Hacktoberfest contributions this month. If you don’t, participant’s PRs will not count towards their four PR-goal -- and your project won’t benefit from their additions.

Here’s how to classify your project as Hacktoberfest-eligible:

⭐ Share your Hacktoberfest progress, discuss, and get help

• Tell us when you've completed all PRs in this thread
• Discuss your experience or ask/answer a question about Hacktoberfest in this thread

⭐ Contribute to Forem!

As an open source organization, Forem is actively seeking contributors, too! We'd love to make your list of projects to contribute to this year!

Learn all about our projects here:

Contribute to Forem this Hacktoberfest!

Christina Gorton for The DEV Team ・ Oct 2 '20

#opensource #meta #hacktoberfest #contributorswanted

Notes on Hacktoberfest Etiquette for Contributors

This year, DigitalOcean has heard from a number of maintainers that they have been experiencing a number of low-quality and spammy pull requests on the first day of Hacktoberfest. This causes a headache for the hard-working maintainers who have to spend their valuable time reviewing PRs and flagging contributions as spam.

We encourage everyone to read this guide on how to be as helpful and respectful as possible when submitting pull requests:

Hacktoberfest Etiquette for Contributors

Christina Gorton for The DEV Team ・ Oct 1 '20

#hacktoberfest #opensource

We can't wait to read about your projects, contributions, and questions and couldn't be more excited to give open source the celebration it deserves... a global one!

If you have any questions or need help, feel free to leave them in the help and discussion thread.

Happy coding!