HacktoberFest ~ Signup and get your Git on

It’s October, which means pumpkins, candy, costumes, and Hacktoberfest 🎃 If you are completely new to open source and contributing on Github, but want to join in the fun, read on. This is the first in a series of posts I will write everyday to help newcomers get the most out of Hacktoberfest. So let us start the journey.

Get your Github Account

The first task in your contribution journey is going to be signing up on Github. It’s completely free, and it’s the largest community on the web of people building open source software. It’s also where all the Hacktoberfest action happens.

So head over to Github, and sign up for your account. When you’re done, come back here and continue the journey.

Installing Git

Part two of your contribution journey is installing Git. In short, Git is distributed source control software that makes collaborating on projects a breeze. For more detail, head over to the Git-SCM website.

If you are on a Linux system, you can install Git one of two ways:

$ sudo dnf install git-all

Or on a Debian based flavour such as Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt install git-all

For a complete list of Linux installation options head over to the Linux page on the Git website.

On MacOS and Windows, the quickest way is simply installing Github Desktop. Not only does this give you a graphical user interface into Git and Github itself, it also:

• Brings along a command line version of Git if the command line is more your style
• Works well with Powershell
• Sets up solid credential caching
• And sane CRLF settings
• That is a long way of saying, it’s pretty dang sweet ;p

You can of course install Git by itself without Github Desktop. To do that, head over to the Git website and download an installer for your operating system.

Sign up for Hacktoberfest

With all of the above done, you are now ready to sign up for Hacktoberfest. DigitalOcean has made it super simple. Head over to the Hacktoberfest website, click on the Sign Up link, and sign up using the Github account you created earlier.

That’s it! You are ready to start contributing to open source, help out project maintainers, gain some new skills, and get a t-shirt for your work. That is a pretty neat deal I reckon.

Oh, and come back tomorrow for the next instalment of this series where we will talk forking, cloning, branching and pull requests. In the mean time, go find a project, or a specific issue you would love to contribute to, and make your intent known by adding a comment to the issue.