# Contributing to MkDocs

An introduction to contributing to the MkDocs project.

The MkDocs project welcomes, and depends, on contributions from developers and
users in the open source community. Contributions can be made in a number of
ways, a few examples are:

- Code patches via pull requests
- Documentation improvements
- Bug reports and patch reviews

## Reporting an Issue

Please include as much detail as you can. Let us know your platform and MkDocs
version. If the problem is visual (for example a theme or design issue) please
add a screenshot and if you get an error please include the full error and
traceback.

## Testing the Development Version

If you want to just install and try out the latest development version of
MkDocs you can do so with the following command. This can be useful if you
want to provide feedback for a new feature or want to confirm if a bug you
have encountered is fixed in the git master. It is **strongly** recommended
that you do this within a [virtualenv].

```bash
pip install https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/archive/master.tar.gz
```

## Installing for Development

First you'll need to fork and clone the repository. Once you have a local
copy, run the following command. It is **strongly** recommended that you do
this within a [virtualenv].

```bash
pip install --editable .
```

This will install MkDocs in development mode which binds the `mkdocs` command
to the git repository.

## Running the tests

To run the tests, it is recommended that you use [Tox]. This just needs
to be pip installed and then the test suite can be ran for MkDocs but running
the command `tox` in the root of your MkDocs repository.

It will attempt to run the tests against all of the Python versions we
support. So don't be concerned if you are missing some and they fail. The rest
will be verified by [Travis] when you submit a pull request.

## Submitting Pull Requests

Once you are happy with your changes or you are ready for some feedback, push
it to your fork and send a pull request. For a change to be accepted it will
most likely need to have tests and documentation if it is a new feature.

[virtualenv]: https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/latest/userguide.html
[tox]: https://tox.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
[travis]: https://travis-ci.org/repositories
