Contributing to Nengo

We welcome all sorts of contributions! The list below is by no means exhaustive.

  • Create: Use Nengo to make a model and share it with the community.
  • Report bugs: Let us know if Nengo crashes or does something that you don’t expect.
  • Develop: Add or modify some code in a Nengo project.
  • Document: Teach others how to use Nengo by adding to or clarifying our documentation.

Sharing your creations

There are several ways to share your Nengo creations with the community. The quickest way is to make a post on the forum.

  1. Head to the examples category of the forum.
  2. If you don’t yet have an account, click the “Sign Up” button at the top-right of the page.
  3. Click on the “New Topic” button at the top-right.
  4. Write your post with the editor that pops up. Format your post with Markdown – make sure you format code blocks so they’re easier to read!

If your creation is too big for a forum post, consider making a pull request on the the examples repository.

Reporting bugs and suggesting features

If you find a bug in any Nengo project, or you think a particular feature would fill a need that you have, file an issue on project’s Github repository.

  1. Head to the project’s Github page (e.g., nengo/nengo-gui).
  2. Click the “Issues” tab at the top of the page.
  3. Click the green “New issue” button at the top-right of the page.

Be sure to include as much detail as you can when filing issues, especially when reporting bugs. The first thing we do to fix bugs is try to reproduce them locally. Try to find the shortest script or sequence of steps to reproduce the bug.

Making pull requests

Whether you’re sharing your creation, developing a Nengo project, or adding documentation, we manage contributions with pull requests.

  1. Start by forking the repository you want to contribute to and cloning it locally.

  2. Before making any changes to the repository, create a new branch for your change – you should never edit code on the master branch! To create a branch, use the command

    git checkout -b <branch name>

    Make sure to give your branch a meaningful name. Names like patch or fix128 are hard to remember later on.

  3. Make the changes you want to make to the repository. If your changes are large, split the changes up into separate meaningful commits.

    git add <files>
git commit

    Make sure you follow our style guide, including the commit message format.

  4. Once your changes are done, push them to Github

    git push origin <branch name>

    and make a pull request on the Nengo project’s repository.

  5. Your pull request will undergo at least one review. Keep in mind that reviewing is a process that can take multiple iterations. Please follow the code of conduct when responding to reviews.