# Contributing

Alliance Auth is developed by the community and we are always looking to welcome new contributors. If you are interested in contributing, here are some ideas where to start:

## Publish a new community app or service

One great way to contribute is to develop and publish your own community app or service for Alliance Auth. By design Auth only comes with some basic features and therefore heavily relies on the community to provide apps to extend Auth with additional features.

To publish your app make sure it can be installed from a public repo or PyPI. Once it's ready, you can inform everybody about your new app by posting it to our [list of community apps](/features/community/index.md).

If you are looking for ideas on what to make, you can check out Auth's [issue list](https://gitlab.com/allianceauth/allianceauth/-/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&label_name[]=enhancement). Many of those issues are feature requests that will probably never make into Auth core, but would be awesome to have as community app or service. You could also ask the other devs on our Discord server for ideas or to help you get a feeling about which new features might be in higher demand than others.

## Help to maintain an existing community app or service

There are quite a few great community apps that need help from additional maintainers. Often the initial author has no time anymore to support his app or would just appreciate some support for working on new features or to fix bugs.

Sometimes original app owners may even be looking to completely hand over their apps to a new owner.

If you are interested to help maintain an existing community app or service you can just start working on open issues and create merge requests. Or just ask other devs on our Discord.

## Help with improving Auth documentation

Auth has an extensive [documentation](https://allianceauth.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), but there are always things to improve and add. If you notice any errors or see something to improve or add please feel free to issue a change for the documentation (via MRs same as code changes).

## Help with support questions on Discord

One of the main functions of the Auth Discord server is to help the community with any support question they may have when installing or running an Auth installation.

Note that you do not need a be part of any official group to become a supporter. Just jump in and help with answering new questions from the community if you know how to help.

## Help to improve Alliance Auth core

Alliance Auth has an issue list, which is usually the basis for all maintenance activities for Auth core. That means that bug fixes and new features are primarily delivered based on existing open issues.

We usually have a long list of open issues and very much welcome every help to fix existing bugs or work on new features for Auth.

Before starting to code on any topic we'd suggest talking to the other devs on Discord to make sure your issue is not already being worked on. Also, some feature request may be better implemented in a community app. Another aspect, which is best clarified by talking with the other devs.

If you like to contribute to Auth core, but are unsure where to start, we have a dedicated label for issues that are suitable for beginners: [beginner friendly](https://gitlab.com/allianceauth/allianceauth/-/issues?label_name%5B%5D=beginner+friendly).

## Additional Resources

For more information on how to create community apps or how to setup a developer environment for Auth, please see our official [developer documentation](/development/index.md).

For getting in touch with other contributors please feel free to join the [Alliance Auth Discord server](https://discord.gg/fjnHAmk).
