Skip to content

Contributing

Thank you for your interest in contributing to Hypernate! This project is part of LF Decentralized Trust Labs, and we welcome contributions of all kinds – from bug reports and documentation fixes to new features.

Ways to Contribute

Type Where to start
Report a bug or request a feature Reporting Issues
Contribute code Working with the Code → Submitting Pull Requests
Improve the documentation Contributing to the Docs
Review pull requests or help others Join us on Discord

You do not need to be a Java expert to help. Triaging issues, improving the docs, and reviewing pull requests are all valuable contributions.

Ground Rules

A few project-wide expectations apply to everyone.

Code of Conduct

All participants are expected to follow the LF Decentralized Trust Code of Conduct. Please read it before getting involved.

Licensing

Hypernate is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Contributions are accepted on an inbound = outbound basis: anything you contribute is provided under the same license. Every source file carries an SPDX header (/* SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 */).

Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO)

All commits must be signed off to certify the Developer Certificate of Origin. In practice this means committing with git commit -s. A DCO check runs on every pull request – see Submitting Pull Requests for the details and how to fix a missing sign-off.

AI-Assisted Contributions

Contributions made with AI coding assistants are welcome, but they are held to the same standards as any other. See Contributing with AI Agents for the policy and the machine-readable AGENTS.md guidance.

Getting Help

The fastest way to reach maintainers and other contributors is Discord:

For usage questions, the Getting Started and Concepts sections are good starting points.

The Contribution Workflow

Most contributions follow the same path:

  1. Discuss first. Open or find an issue describing the bug or change. Every contribution – including trivial fixes – needs the issue labeled design/approved before you start coding, and an automated check enforces this on every pull request.
  2. Set up your environment. Follow Working with the Code to build and test locally.
  3. Make your changes using Conventional Commits, and sign off every commit.
  4. Open a pull request. See Submitting Pull Requests for the checklist and review process.

In This Section