CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing To ZMK

Thanks for taking an interest in contributing to ZMK! After reading through the documentation, if you have any questions, please come join us on the ZMK Discord Server.

Code of Conduct

All community members are expected to abide by the Code of Conduct. For any and all conduct inquiries or concerns, please contact conduct@zmk.dev.

How Can I Contribute

There are many different ways that you can contribute to ZMK, several of which require no coding abilities. These include:

• Chat Support
• Issue Reporting/Commenting
• Testing
• Documentation
• Code Contributions

Chat Support

Providing user support on the ZMK Discord Server is a great way to help the project. In particular, answering questions in the #help channel is incredibly appreciated.

Issue Reporting/Commenting

Often, you might encounter unexpected behavior when building, flashing, or running the ZMK firmware. Submitting or commenting on issues on GitHub is a great way to contribute to the ZMK project.

Before Submitting a Report

• Review the Frequently Asked Questions.
• Check the Troubleshooting Guide for answers.
• Search the open issues for an existing report that matches your problem.

Opening A Report

To open a report:

• Head to https://github.com/zmkfirmware/zmk/issues/new
• Provide an accurate summary of the issue in the title.
• Provide as much detail as you can about the issue including:
  • What board/shield you are using.
  • A link to the user repository, if you used it to build your firmware.
  • Exact steps to reproduce the problem.
  • Any relevant screenshots or logs

Testing

The help wanted label will be added to any pull requests or issues where user testing can assist the ZMK contributors to verify fixes, confirm bugs, etc.

When providing testing feedback, please provide:

• Exact steps used to test
• Any hardware details relevant to testing
• Pass/fail summary for testing.
• Full details of any failures, including:
  • Logs
  • Screenshots

Documentation

Quality documentation is a huge part of what makes a successful project. Contributions to add documentation to areas not currently covered are greatly appreciated.

Contributing

• The documentation site can be found in the main ZMK repo, in the docs/ subdirectory.
• The documentation is maintained using Docusaurus V2.
• To get started, from the docs/ directory, run npm ci and then npm start.
• Enhancements should be submitted as pull requests to the main branch of ZMK.

Formatting

ZMK uses prettier to format documentation files. You can run prettier with npm run prettier:format. You can setup git to run prettier automatically when you commit by installing the pre-commit hooks: pip3 install pre-commit, pre-commit install.

Code Contributions

Development Setup

To get your development environment setup going, start at the basic setup docs, and make sure you can build and flash your own locally built firmware.

Formatting

ZMK uses clang-format to ensure consist formatting for our source code. Before submitting your changes, make sure you've manually run clang-format, or have your IDE configured to auto-format on save.

You can setup git to run clang-format automatically when you commit by installing the pre-commit hooks: pip3 install pre-commit, pre-commit install.

Commit Messages

The ZMK project is working towards, but not yet enforcing, the use of conventional commits for commit messages.

Further documentation and details will be provided here soon.

Pull Requests

When opening a pull request with your changes, please:

• Submit the PR to the main branch of the zmkfirmware/zmk repository.
• Use a descriptive title that summarizes the change.
• In the description, include:
  • References to any open issues fixed by the PR.
  • Feature added by the PR
  • Bugs fixed by the PR.
  • Testing you've performed locally.
  • Requested testing by reviewers or testers.
  • Screenshots or logs that support understanding the change.