Contributing

Contributions are welcome, and they are greatly appreciated! Every little bit helps, and credit will always be given.

Types of Contributions

Report Bugs

If you are reporting a bug, please include:

Your operating system name and version.
Any details about your local setup that might be helpful in troubleshooting.
Detailed steps to reproduce the bug.

Fix Bugs

Look through the GitHub issues for bugs. Anything tagged with “bug” and “help wanted” is open to whoever wants to implement it.

Implement Features

Look through the GitHub issues for features. Anything tagged with “enhancement” and “help wanted” is open to whoever wants to implement it.

Write Documentation

You can never have enough documentation! Please feel free to contribute to any part of the documentation, such as the official docs, docstrings, or even on the web in blog posts, articles, and such.

Submit Feedback

If you are proposing a feature:

Explain in detail how it would work.
Keep the scope as narrow as possible, to make it easier to implement.
Remember that this is a volunteer-driven project, and that contributions are welcome :)

Get Started!

Ready to contribute? Here’s how to set up viam for local development.

Prerequisites

We use uv to manage our environments and dependencies. Make sure you have uv installed.

Download/clone a copy of viam locally.
Install viam using make:
```
$ make install
```
Use git (or similar) to create a branch for local development and make your changes:
```
$ git checkout -b name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature
```
When you’re done making changes, check that your changes conform to any code formatting requirements and pass any tests.

When testing, make sure you use the correct virtual environment by running either uv run make test or source .venv/bin/activate; make test

Commit your changes and open a pull request.

Pull Request Guidelines

Before you submit a pull request, check that it meets these guidelines:

The pull request should include additional tests if appropriate.
If the pull request adds functionality, the docs should be updated.
The pull request should work for all currently supported operating systems and versions of Python.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the viam project is released with a Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project you agree to abide by its terms.