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Contribute to IOTA Documentation

As open source software, IOTA depends on community contributions. This page covers the process for contributing to IOTA's documentation.

To make changes to the documentation, you can fork and clone the IOTA repository to your local machine and make changes from your preferred IDE of choice, or by the web interface on GitHub. This guide covers both scenarios.

Style guide compliance​

All changes to the documentation must follow the style guide, as well as the review process and information on the editors throughout the process. Do not be offended by the number of change requests your docs PR might receive. This is not a reflection on your writing abilities, but an effort to keep a consistent tone across the documentation set. Depending on reviewer and workload, some reviews are more thorough than others. After your PR merges, your content might be changed at a later date to align better with IOTA writing standards.

To create more engaging content, be sure to follow these rules in particular:

Set up local environment​

Cloning the documentation locally is recommended when you are creating larger, more significant changes to the docs. See IOTA Environment Setup for instructions on forking the IOTA repository, if necessary. The documentation is in the docs/content directory.

  1. If you are using the recommended Visual Studio Code IDE, install Prettier to ensure that your formatting is consistent.
  2. After you make all your changes, stage all files with changes (git add . to add all modified files), create a local commit (git commit -m “message”), and then push all your changes to your forked repository (git push).
  3. To view your changes via localhost, enter pnpm install into a terminal at the docs/site directory to install dependencies, then pnpm start to view the changes on localhost:3000 to ensure that the website works as intended. You might need to install the pnpm package manager if you don't already have it.

For beginners​

Editing the documentation via the GitHub web interface is recommended if you are not familiar with working in an IDE, or for smaller changes and fixes.

Add New Page

Navigate to the docs/content directory, then navigate to the appropriate subdirectory and click the Add file button in the top-right. Select create new file to create a new file and edit it directly on GitHub's web interface.

Change Existing Page

To change an existing page, navigate to the file you want to edit, click on the pencil icon in the top-right, and edit your changes there.

Review process​

When you are finished creating your changes in your own fork or using the web interface, submit a PR to the IOTA repository. When you do so, you can view the deployment on Vercel and double-check that everything behaves the way you intend. For every unique commit in a PR, Vercel generates a new preview. A reviewer then takes responsibility for providing clear and actionable feedback to your PR. As the owner of the PR, it is your responsibility to modify your PR to address the feedback that has been provided to you by the reviewer. Keep in mind that you may receive feedback from multiple reviewers. After a reviewer has approved your PR, it is merged into main and your contributions are made public.