How To Contribute

pVACtools is an open-source project. We enthusiastically welcome outside contributions.

The pVACtools source code is hosted on GitHub. Code changes are made via pull requests to the main repository. The First Contributions project has a neat guide of all the steps involved.

One thing to note is that the pVACtools project uses staging and hotfix branches to manage major/minor and patch releases, respectively. Depending on the type of your contribution you will need to branch your change branch off of either staging for new features or hotfix for bugfixes and use one these two branches as the base branch of your pull request. Pull requests should never be made to the master branch.

The pVACtools projects uses milestones to assign issues to specific releases. Each milestone is named with a version number, which indicates the version of the upcoming release. Upcoming milestones/versions can be found here. An issue in an open milestone may be closed if the respective feature has been addressed (i.e. added via a merged pull request), even though the release for the open milestone has not been made yet. Therefore, a closed issue does not indicate that a feature is already available in a release yet. We urge users to also search closed issues for any problem they may encounter and to check whether a desired feature addition has already been made but isn’t released yet.