AuthorCarpentry is an open source project, and we welcome contributions of all kinds: new lessons, fixes to existing material, bug reports, and reviews of proposed changes are all welcome.
By contributing, you agree that we may redistribute your work under our license. In exchange, we will address your issues and/or assess your change proposal as promptly as we can, and help you become a member of our community. Everyone involved in Author Carpentry agrees to abide by our code of conduct.
Fork the authorcarpentry/lesson-name repository on GitHub.
The default branch in our lessons is gh-pages. Create a new branch for your changes.
Give your branch a meaningful name, such as fixing-typos-in-shell-lesson or adding-tutorial-on-visualization.
Clone this repository and branch to work with it on your computer.
git clone the repository with -b ‘branch name’
Make your changes, render, commit them, and push them to your repository on GitHub.
Send a pull request to the gh-pages branch of the main datacarpentry repository at http://github.com/authorcarpentry/lesson-name. This can be done through the github web interface.
If it is easier for you to send them to us some other way, please mail us at authorcarpentry@library.caltech.edu. Given a choice between you creating content or wrestling with Git, we’d rather have you doing the former.
Every lesson has a repository of its own, while individual topics are files in that directory. For example, the shell-ecology directory holding our introduction to the shell for ecology contains the files 00-intro.md, 01-filedir.md and so on. (We use two digits followed by a one-word topic key to ensure files appear in the right order when listed.)
All lesson content is written in markdown.
We use mkpage to render lesson content, which should be done on your local machine. You render content by typing ‘./mk-website.bash’ once you’re finishing making edits.
You can use ws to view the content locally by typing ‘ws’ and pointing your web browser to http://localhost:8000
To ensure a consistent formatting of the lessons, we recommend the following guidelines:
Where can I get help?
Mail us at authorcarpentry@library.caltech.edu