Contribute to Open Source With LocalStack & Hacktoberfest

It’s October 2022, and we have a few surprises already in store for our open-source community. LocalStack is participating in Hacktoberfest 2022, a month-long open-source program to promote and bolster open-source contribution and collaboration! We are opening up projects to contribute to for our first Hacktoberfest, and we are incredibly excited to welcome new first-time contributors to our community and celebrate their contributions!

If you have always been interested & intrigued by open-source and LocalStack but don’t know where to start, then Hacktoberfest is a perfect place for you to start.

Open-Source at LocalStack

At LocalStack, open-source contribution and collaboration are at our heart. LocalStack started as a small open-source project in August 2016 to help engineers emulate AWS services locally. The initial commit added eight core AWS APIs and the project grew with the inclusion of new contributors.

Today, LocalStack is a flagship product on GitHub, powered by over 43,000+ stargazers, 15,000+ Slack Community members, and over 100 million Docker pulls. We also support over 80 AWS services, including exotic and sophisticated AWS APIs, third-party integrations, CI providers, and more.

We have also achieved the 1.0 release backed up by the support of an exciting ecosystem that is inching towards making the cloud development experience a breeze. Our contributor base has also expanded to over 400 contributors worldwide, and things are just getting started.

We are now looking for more contributions from the community, whether it is a minor documentation fix, bug triaging, or feature improvement. We appreciate all contributions coming in, and we are looking to support all new-time contributors who are looking to contribute through Hacktoberfest.

Getting started with Hacktoberfest

LocalStack is participating in Hacktoberfest with the following projects: LocalStack, LocalStack Docs, LocalStack Samples & Terraform Samples. We are not just accepting code-based contributions but also no-code contributions like documentation, design, bug triage, and more! Contributors with four or more merged pull requests will be considered for the Hacktoberfest prizes if they follow all Hacktoberfest guidelines.

Follow these simple steps to get started:

1. Register on the Hacktoberfest website between September 26 and October 31, 2022.
2. Look through our above projects and create/find issues you would like to work on!
3. Contribute to the projects by following our hacktoberfest tag between October 1 to October 31.
4. Ensure follow-ups with the maintainers on respective pull requests to ensure they are merged before the end of Hacktoberfest.

After your pull request is merged, share your achievement on the #community channel of our community slack. After the end of Hacktoberfest, all the contributors will be acknowledged in a public community post over our Discussion pages.

But what’s new apart from the official Hacktoberfest prizes? Your contributions call for more awesome schwag! To celebrate your contributions during Hacktoberfest, we have some limited edition swag up for grabs!

• 4 contributions: LocalStack T-Shirt
• 10 contributions: LocalStack T-Shirt + Amazon $25 gift-card
• Best contribution: LocalStack Gift Box + Amazon $50 gift-card

While selecting the best contribution is tricky, we recommend you to look apart from regular LocalStack issues to find something significant to work on. Ideas can vary from a new AWS service (you can scaffold it quickly with ASF), a significant bug fix, new examples, blogs, or more! A contribution would be considered irrespective of whether we merged a pull request or not.

How should we ask for help?

To help our ever-growing community of users and developers, we have made significant new additions to our developer guide to make it easy for you to contribute to LocalStack! If you are looking to set up LocalStack for the first time, we have an increasingly helpful walkthrough guiding you to kick-start your LocalStack development.

Apart from the above documentation, we recommend everyone reach out to us on the community slack to connect with our engineers and fellow contributors. If you have any questions about using LocalStack or developing on LocalStack, we would be more than happy to support you and guide you in the correct direction to get you started!

We are also organizing our next community meetup on contributing to LocalStack with LocalStack engineers. If you have ever wanted to know what it is like to contribute to a project like LocalStack, make sure to join the community RSVP on our Meetup page.

Conclusion

LocalStack is on a mission to become the standard platform for local cloud development. With Hacktoberfest, we are incredibly grateful to continue working on our core open-source software with new contributors, and we would love to provide you with all the support you might need. Over the entire period, we would be working closely with our new contributors and would be sharing exciting topics and updates that are coming up!

Let’s collaborate to create a superb developer experience and make cloud development fun! 🚀