# Contributing Guidelines

Thank you for your interest in improving the OpenSource documentation! We value and appreciate all feedback and contributions from our community, including requests for additional documentation, corrections to existing content, and to report technical issues with the documentation site. 

The OpenSearch documentation team is dedicated to providing complete and best-in-class documentation. Thank you for your patience as we build our documentation team and content library. We appreciate your support and patience.

## How to request changes

Before entering a change request, please read this document carefully. We want to make sure we have all the information necessary to effectively respond to your contribution. 

There are two ways to contribute: 1) create an issue where you describe the change and 2) create a pull request that contains the content to directly insert into the documentation.

**Create an Issue**

Use the Github issue tracker to describe the change you'd like to make. 

1. Go to https://github.com/opensearch-project/documentation-website/issues and select *New issue*.
2. Enter the requested information and include as much detail as possible, especially which version or versions the request affects.
3. Select *Submit new issue*. 


The ‘untriaged’ label is assigned automatically. During the triage process, the documentation team will add the appropriate labels, assign the issue to a technical writer, and prioritize the request. We may follow up with you for additional information. 


**Create a pull request**

If you’d like to make a change directly to the content, create a pull request. If it’s a quick fix, we should be able to release the update quickly. Bigger requests might take a bit of time for us to review. 

Note that a pull request requires DCO sign off before we can merge it. You can use the -s command line option to append this automatically to your commit message, for example $ git commit -s -m 'This is my commit message'. For more information, see https://github.com/apps/dco.

Before submitting, make sure to:

* Work against the latest source on the main branch.
* Check existing open and recently merged pull requests to ensure that someone else hasn't addressed the problem already.
* If the change requires significant work, open an issue where we can first discuss your request.

To create a pull request:

1. Fork the repository.
2. Modify the source. Make sure to focus on the specific change you are contributing. For example, if you also reformat the code, it will be hard for us to focus on your change.
3. Test the code. Make sure that any local tests pass.
4. Commit to your fork using clear commit messages.
5. Create the [pull request](https://github.com/opensearch-project/documentation-website/pulls) and save it, making sure to answer the default questions in the pull request template.

If you need additional support, GitHub provides documentation on [forking a repository](https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo/) and [creating a pull request](https://help.github.com/articles/creating-a-pull-request/).


## Finding contributions to work on

If you’d like to contribute but don't know where to start, try browsing existing issues. Our projects use custom GitHub issue labels for status, version, type of request, etc., but we recommend looking at any issues labeled “good first issue” first. 


## Code of Conduct

This project has adopted the [Amazon Open Source Code of Conduct](https://aws.github.io/code-of-conduct). For more information see the [Code of Conduct FAQ](https://aws.github.io/code-of-conduct-faq) or contact opensource-codeofconduct@amazon.com with any additional questions or comments.


## Security issue notifications

If you discover a potential security issue in this project we ask that you notify AWS/Amazon Security via our [vulnerability reporting page](http://aws.amazon.com/security/vulnerability-reporting/). Please do **not** create a public github issue.


## Licensing

See the [LICENSE](LICENSE) file for our project's licensing. 
