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Contributing to Packer

First: if you're unsure or afraid of anything, just ask or submit the issue or pull request anyways. You won't be yelled at for giving your best effort. The worst that can happen is that you'll be politely asked to change something. We appreciate any sort of contributions, and don't want a wall of rules to get in the way of that.

However, for those individuals who want a bit more guidance on the best way to contribute to the project, read on. This document will cover what we're looking for. By addressing all the points we're looking for, it raises the chances we can quickly merge or address your contributions.

Issues

Reporting an Issue

Make sure you test against the latest released version. It is possible we already fixed the bug you're experiencing.
Run the command with debug ouput with the environment variable PACKER_LOG. For example: PACKER_LOG=1 packer build template.json. Take the entire output and create a gist for linking to in your issue. Packer should strip sensitive keys from the output, but take a look through just in case.
Provide a reproducible test case. If a contributor can't reproduce an issue, then it dramatically lowers the chances it'll get fixed. And in some cases, the issue will eventually be closed.
Respond promptly to any questions made by the Packer team to your issue. Stale issues will be closed.

Issue Lifecycle

The issue is reported.
The issue is verified and categorized by a Packer collaborator. Categorization is done via tags. For example, bugs are marked as "bugs" and easy fixes are marked as "easy".
Unless it is critical, the issue is left for a period of time (sometimes many weeks), giving outside contributors a chance to address the issue.
The issue is addressed in a pull request or commit. The issue will be referenced in the commit message so that the code that fixes it is clearly linked.
The issue is closed.

Setting up Go to work on Packer

If you have never worked with Go before, you will have to complete the following steps in order to be able to compile and test Packer.

Install Go. On a Mac, you can brew install go. Make sure the Go version is at least Go 1.1. Packer will not work with anything less than Go 1.1.
Set and export the GOPATH environment variable. For example, you can add export GOPATH=$HOME/Documents/golang to your .bash_profile.
Download the Packer source (and its dependencies) by running go get github.com/mitchellh/packer. This will download the Packer source to $GOPATH/src/github.com/mitchellh/packer.
Make your changes to the Packer source. You can run make from the main source directory to recompile all the binaries. Any compilation errors will be shown when the binaries are rebuilding.
Test your changes by running make test and then running $GOPATH/src/github.com/mitchellh/packer/bin/packer to build a machine.
If everything works well and the tests pass, run go fmt on your code before submitting a pull request.