Getting involved
Helping out with Koha is easy: the community is friendly and international. It is used & developed by libraries and developers from around the world, so you're sure to find someone speaking your language in the community. Koha also has extensive documentation, written and maintained by our excellent documentation team.
This page will guide you through all the information you need to make the most of our community resources.
If you have a bit more experience already then you can always come back here to use this page as a reference guide.
Finally, you certainly don't need to be a developer to participate in the Koha community! There are many different tasks, to reflect people from many different backgrounds and with many different skills!
First steps into the community
We mostly talk to each other in 2 ways: by email or by IRC chat.
It's best if you set up tools for both, so you won't have to worry about how to get in touch with us when you need help. And you will need help, because we all do, all the time!
You can sign up to the mailing lists by following these instructions.
You can then find out how to come say hello in the Mattermost real time chat where most of the Community hangs out or come and say hello in the Koha IRC channel (there is a bridge from the IRC channel to Mattermost, so you can see it all in Mattermost).
Once per month we hold a general and also a developer meeting. You can join either for any Koha related questions, though we recommend you use the developer meeting for technical subjects. In any case, you don't have to be a developer to attend!
Joubu recently compiled the results of a community poll to the website. It's very short but might guide where you decide to start.
Finally, to figure out how we make decisions and how we decide when to release a new version of Koha.
Voilá, you can now start contributing to Koha!
Documenting & translating Koha: using your language skills for good
Whether you're a linguistic wizard or a mere apprentice, improve the world by contributing to our manual, or by joining the translation team!
Improving our manual
A piece of software is only as good as its manual, and people who are good at writing manuals are worth their weight in gold.
Follow the steps on this page to land your first contributions to our manual.
Becoming a translator
Koha thrives on being an international project. Koha is available in many different languages, thanks to the ongoing work of our talented translators.
If you are great at your native language and good at English, help us out by becoming a translator.
Once you have stepped through the above document, get cracking at https://translate.koha-community.org!
Going on a bug hunt…
I've found a bug! What do I do?
Report the bug! Bug reports help us to improve improve Koha; good bug reports are possibly the single-best way to help us improve Koha!
Find out how to submit *great* bug reports!
Testing bug fixes
Koha has a stringent quality assurance work-flow to ensure we mostly release code that works.
Anyone can contribute a fix for a reported bug, but not all fixes will become part of Koha. Fixes are vetted by our QA (quality assurance) team, before our RM (release manager) pushes them into the product. But before our QA team can check a fix it first needs to be tested and signed off by Koha users.
Testing bug fixes is this first and essential step.
Read the Tester handbook to find out all there is to know about being a gold star tester. You can also follow this tutorial to find out how to handle simple proposed fixes.
Finally, if you run into difficulties, remember chat! Bug testing is an art; mastering it is hard — but all great artists are held in great esteem!
Fixing bugs: submitting patches
Of course we also welcome contributions in code!
We have an ever evolving Developer handbook that might be your first point of call, or reference guide. Outside of this, you can follow our crash course in Koha hacking or learn how to set up a dedicated testing and hacking environment.
- Getting involved | Development workflow | Bug Reporting Guidelines | RFCs | Plugins | Plugin hooks
- Version Control Using Git | git bz | Commit messages | Sign off on patches | QA Test Tools | How to QA | Debugging in VIM
- Coding Guidelines | Koha Objects | Rest Api HowTo | Coding Guidelines - API | Unit Tests | Continuous Integration | Interface patterns | Database updates | Adding a syspref | Bootstrap and LESS
- Debian Packages | Building Debian Packages | Easy Package Building | Commands
- External: Dashboard | Bugzilla | Schema | perldoc | REST API | Jenkins