Finding a Project

Before you can contribute to Mozilla, you need to find a project that you’re interested in contributing to. There are many different projects in Webdev, both full websites and libraries to help others make websites.

If you don’t already have a project in mind, there are a few ways to find projects to contribute to:

  • The GetInvolved page lists a curated selection of projects as well as information on who to get in contact with if you want to help.
  • If you email the dev-webdev@lists.mozilla.org mailing list with some information on what your skills are and where your interests lie, someone may reply with a recommendation.

Getting set up

Once you’ve identified the project you want to work on, you should set up a development instance of the site. All projects have (or should have) a README file that either describes how to set up the site for development, or links to documentation that does.

Find a mentor

You may also find it useful to find someone who is working on or responsible for the project you want to contribute to and asking if they can help you find a task to work on and answer any other questions you have. If there’s no information in the README for a project about who works on it, you can check the commit history (available in GitHub by clicking “# commits” near the top of the page) to find who recently worked on the project, or by asking the Webdev group who is responsible.

How to contribute

Once you’re set up to work on a project, you’ll have to find a task to work on and get to work! Each project should have some information on where their tasks are tracked, whether it be in Bugzilla, GitHub issues, or some other system. If you’re having trouble finding this information, try looking:

  • For a CONTRIBUTNG file in the repository. Many projects use this file to store instructions on how to start as a contributor.
  • For a contribute.json file, which contains a machine-readable dump of links and information on how to start contributing to a project.