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Copyright and Licensing

All contributors to LibreNMS retain copyright to their own code and are not required to sign over their rights to any other party. Code should be licensed under the GPLv3 and MUST NOT contain non-GPL Observium code or GPL incompatible code. To be safe do not view Observium code at all. See Licensing for more details.

General Guidelines

  • Test your patches first.
  • Don't break the poller. User interface blemishes are not critical, but losing data from network monitoring systems might be.
  • As a general rule, if you're replacing lines of code with new lines of code, don't comment them out, just delete them. Commented out code makes the patch and the resultant code harder to read, and there's no good reason to it since we can easily get them back from git.
  • If you're fixing a bug or making another minor change, don't reformat the code at the same time. This makes it harder to see what's changed. If you need to reformat it after making the change, do so in a separate commit.
  • Please join us in discord if you are able. Collaborating in real time makes the coordination of contributions easier.
  • Ensure you read the Code Guidelines documentation and understand the code style that should be adhered to. You can validate that your code adheres to these guidelines before submitting.
  • Check Style Guidelines for Web UI guidelines and conventions.

How to Contribute

  • Getting Started Set up your development environment to make things easier.
  • Using Git gives you step-by-step instructions on using git to submit a pull request.
  • Code Structure can help you understand where specific code exists in LibreNMS.
  • Creating Documentation It is very important for the continued improvement of LibreNMS that we have good documentation. If you see anything that that needs improvement please submit a pull request to fix it.

Don't be afraid to submit a GitHub Pull Request. We will help you with anything that needs to be change or suggest ways of improving your patch. Because the maintainers are volunteers too sometimes response may be delayed or brief, please be patient or ask for clarification if needed. Thanks!

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