Development: contributing guidelines

Last updated on 2025-03-26.

Contributions with the Onion Services ecosystem are not just welcomed but needed :)

To make working together more fruitful, here are some basic guidance in how to contribute.

Code of Conduct

The Tor Project is committed to fostering an inclusive environment and community. Tor is a place where people should feel safe to engage, share their point of view, and participate.

Check out the Tor Project Code of Conduct for details.

Creating an account on GitLab

The first thing to do is getting an account on Tor's GitLab instance.

It may take a while to get an approval (perhaps even a few days), meanwhile you can start working in a task.

Choosing tasks

There are usually more things to do than people available.

While some tasks involve more knowledge and experience with Onion Services, other are ready for people that are getting their first contact with the technology. These are labelled in the Onion Services issue tracker as First Contribution tasks, and are usually awaiting somebody to pick them.

Merge requests

Tips for doing merge requests:

• When planning to submit a huge feature or bug fix, please coordinate with the maintainer first, as this usually involves a lot of work for reviewing, testing and integration.
• Please avoid big merge requests: they may be hard to review and integrate.