The Hugo community and maintainers are very active and helpful, and the project benefits greatly from this activity. We created a [step by step guide](https://gohugo.io/tutorials/how-to-contribute-to-hugo/) if you're unfamiliar with GitHub or contributing to open source projects in general.
We have an active [discussion forum](http://discuss.gohugo.io) where users and developers can ask questions.
Please don't use the Github issue tracker to ask questions.
## Reporting Issues
If you believe you have found a defect in Hugo or its documentation, use
the Github [issue tracker](https://github.com/spf13/hugo/issues) to report the problem to the Hugo maintainers.
If you're not sure if it's a bug or not, start by asking in the [discussion forum](http://discuss.gohugo.io).
When reporting the issue, please provide the version of Hugo in use (`hugo version`) and your operating system.
## Submitting Patches
The Hugo project welcomes all contributors and contributions regardless of skill or experience level.
If you are interested in helping with the project, we will help you with your contribution.
Hugo is a very active project with many contributions happening daily.
Because we want to create the best possible product for our users and the best contribution experience for our developers,
we have a set of guidelines which ensure that all contributions are acceptable.
The guidelines are not intended as a filter or barrier to participation.
If you are unfamiliar with the contribution process, the Hugo team will help you and teach you how to bring your contribution in accordance with the guidelines.
### Code Contribution Guidelines
To make the contribution process as seamless as possible, we ask for the following:
* Go ahead and fork the project and make your changes. We encourage pull requests to allow for review and discussion of code changes.
* Sign the [CLA](https://cla-assistant.io/spf13/hugo).
* Have test cases for the new code. If you have questions about how to do this, please ask in your pull request.
* Run `go fmt`.
* Add documentation if you are adding new features or changing functionality. The docs site lives in `/docs`.
* Squash your commits into a single commit. `git rebase -i`. It’s okay to force update your pull request with `git push -f`.
* Make sure `go test ./...` passes, and `go build` completes. [Travis CI](https://travis-ci.org/spf13/hugo) (Linux and OS X) and [AppVeyor](https://ci.appveyor.com/project/spf13/hugo/branch/master) (Windows) will catch most things that are missing.
* Follow the **Git Commit Message Guidelines** below.
This [blog article](http://chris.beams.io/posts/git-commit/) is a good resource for learning how to write good commit messages,
the most important part being that each commit message should have a title/subject in imperative mood starting with a capital letter and no trailing period:
*"Return error on wrong use of the Paginator"*, **NOT***"returning some error."*
Also, if your commit references one or more GitHub issues, always end your commit message body with *See #1234* or *Fixes #1234*.
Replace *1234* with the GitHub issue ID. The last example will close the issue when the commit is merged into *master*.
Sometimes it makes sense to prefix the commit message with the packagename (or docs folder) all lowercased ending with a colon.
That is fine, but the rest of the rules above apply.
So it is "tpl: Add emojify template func", not "tpl: add emojify template func.", and "docs: Document emoji", not "doc: document emoji."