Please take a moment to review this document in order to make the contribution process easy and effective for everyone involved.

Submitting an issue that is improperly or incompletely written is a waste of time for everybody.

Following these guidelines helps to communicate that you respect the time of the developers managing and developing this open source project. In return, they should reciprocate that respect in addressing your issue or assessing patches and features.

The issue tracker is the preferred channel for bug reports, feature requests and submitting pull requests, but please respect the following restrictions:

• Please do not use the issue tracker for personal support requests.
  Use discussions instead to ask the community for help.

• Please do not derail or troll issues.
  Keep the discussion on topic and respect the opinions of others.

A bug is a demonstrable problem that is caused by the code in the repository. Good bug reports are extremely helpful - thank you!

Guidelines for bug reports:

1. Use the GitHub issue search
   Check if the issue has already been reported. Reporting duplicates is a waste of time for everyone. Search in all issues, open and closed.

2. Check if the issue has been fixed
   Try to reproduce it using the latest master or development branch in the repository. Maybe it has been fixed since the last stable release.

3. Give details
   A good bug report shouldn't leave others needing to chase you up for more information. Please try to be as detailed as possible in your report. Give any information that is relevant to the bug:

   • YOURLS & MySQL & PHP versions
   • Server Software
   • Browser name & version

   What is the expected output? What do you see instead? See the report example below.

4. Isolate the problem
   Isolate the problem as much as you can, reduce to the bare minimum required to reproduce the issue. Don't describe a general situation that doesn't work as expected and just count on us to pin point the problem.

Feature requests are welcome. But take a moment to find out whether your idea fits with the scope and aims of the project. It's up to you to make a strong case to convince the YOURLS developers of the merits of this feature. Please provide as much detail and context as possible.

Good pull requests - patches, improvements, new features - are a fantastic help. They should remain focused in scope and avoid containing unrelated commits.

1. Please ask first
   Before embarking on any significant pull request (e.g. implementing features, refactoring code), otherwise you risk spending a lot of time working on something that the developers might not want to merge into the project.
2. Licensing
   By submitting a patch, you agree that your code will be licensed under the MIT License terms.
3. Coding Standards
   Please adhere to the coding conventions used throughout the project (indentation, comments, etc.). Make sure you've tested your patch under different scenarios (various browsers, non default installation path, etc.).

Adhering to the following this process is the best way to get your work merged:

1. Fork the repo, clone your fork, and configure the remotes.

   # Clone your fork of the repo into the current directory
   git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/<repo-name>
   # Navigate to the newly cloned directory
   cd <repo-name>
   # Assign the original repo to a remote called "upstream"
   git remote add upstream https://github.com/<upsteam-owner>/<repo-name>

2. If you cloned a while ago, get the latest changes from upstream.

   git checkout <dev-branch>
   git pull upstream <dev-branch>

3. Create a new topic branch (off the main project development branch) to contain your feature, change, or fix.

   git checkout -b <topic-branch-name>

4. Commit your changes in logical chunks. Please adhere to these git commit message guidelines or your code is unlikely be merged into the main project. Use Git's interactive rebase feature to tidy up your commits before making them public.

5. Locally merge (or rebase) the upstream development branch into your topic branch:

   git pull [--rebase] upstream <dev-branch>

6. Push your topic branch up to your fork:

   git push origin <topic-branch-name>

7. Open a Pull Request with a clear title and description.