Hey there, thank you for heading here and your interest in improving Codeberg. This page is intended to give you a quick start on how and where to contribute code to the platform of Codeberg itself. Some things are always changing, and we're not (yet) good at continuously updating the docs on that — but we're always glad to help you with your questions. Just reach out and ask!
Since Codeberg uses [Forgejo](https://forgejo.org/) as a base, which itself is a soft-fork of [Gitea](https://gitea.io/). Most features that go beyond [configuration changes](https://docs.gitea.com/next/administration/config-cheat-sheet) and branding (e.g. the `codeberg-light` and `codeberg-dark` themes) should be addressed upstream; all contributions to both Forgejo and Gitea essentially help Codeberg by proxy and are immensely appreciated.
Also check out the [Codeberg](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg) and [Codeberg-Infrastructure](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-Infrastructure) organizations, they contain numerous other software and setup projects that will appreciate your contributions.
Running Codeberg means running lots of projects. Later sections of this tutorial will focus on Forgejo, which is one of the most crucial and arguably complex project of Codeberg.
A complete list with all of our projects, as well as their respective maintainers and chatrooms, can be found in [our Contributing repository](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Contributing).
## Working with Forgejo
Forgejo itself is written in [Go](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)). Don't let that intimidate you! Some contributors have made changes to Forgejo and Gitea without having programmed anything in the language beforehand; Go is focused on being a very easy and maintainable language, so you should not get intimidated by it (especially if you have experience with *Python* or a variant of *C* already).
### Finding issues to work on
The following issue trackers may contain a few ideas for things that could be worked on:
- [Codeberg Community Tracker](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues?&state=open&labels=338)
We also recommend working on changes that *personally* bother you first. Something in the direction of simple UI changes changes would probably make the most sense, as they are the easiest to get started with and will help you get more acquainted with the codebase (which could help you solve more complicated problems later) in the process.
Solving easy problems helps a lot too! It makes Codeberg's underlying software look much more polished; it also lets other contributors use more of their limited time to solve very sophisticated or unexpected problems.
In the *Codeberg Community Tracker*, there are some issues that are marked using the [`contribution welcome`](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues?&state=open&labels=105) tag. This tag is meant to show that we would really appreciate your help here. They also act as a good starting point if you are looking for something to work on.
### Where should I send my patch?
Codeberg has two repositories related to Forgejo:
- [Codeberg-Infrastructure/build-deploy-forgejo](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-Infrastructure/build-deploy-forgejo): Contains scripts that are used to set up our Codeberg instance
- [Codeberg/forgejo](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/forgejo): Forgejo fork that contains branding changes (e.g. themes), hot-fixes for urgent issues (like "dirty" anti-spam measures) and unofficial backports with features or fixes that we find important.
If you have a problem with how Codeberg looks like or if you would like to change something to Codeberg's documentation, you would probably have to submit your change to one of these two repositories.
Alternatively, you should probably send in your patches to [Forgejo](https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo) or [Gitea](https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea).
We would recommend sending your patches to *Forgejo*, as it is a project that is heavily associated and works together with Codeberg. Any changes made to Forgejo will land to Codeberg
In order to start working with the Forgejo repository, we would recommend checking out [the Forgejo docs](https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/developer/) and [the Gitea docs](https://docs.gitea.com/development/hacking-on-gitea) first.
They provide more detailed and especially more up-to-date information than we could maintain in our own docs. Additionally, there's probably no need for redundancy here 😉.
If you get stuck at any point, Forgejo provides [chatrooms](https://matrix.to/#/#forgejo:matrix.org) that have people that would be willing to help you.
This is the deployment system for the Codeberg infrastructure, it updates, builds, configures and deploys Forgejo.
If you want to work on new features, please don't use it, but choose our [Forgejo fork](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/forgejo) instead. You shouldn't normally need to bother running `build-deploy-forgejo`.
The deployment of Codeberg is handled via the [Codeberg/build-deploy-forgejo](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/build-deploy-forgejo) repository. While there's some work on different deployment approaches (more to that later), this is the way stuff is handled as of today.
The deployment Makefile connects to a remote server via ssh, so we recommend configuring a virtual machine for this. You can use the provided script or perform the following tasks inside your favourite VM / container solution:
- Run the Makefile and see that Forgejo is installed, you can override variables and run it like `make HOSTNAME_FQDN=localhost deployment`
- After Forgejo is installed, you might want to create an admin user for testing (should otherwise be first user by default), you can use `sudo -u git GITEA_WORK_DIR=/data/git GITEA_CUSTOM/etc/gitea /data/git/bin/forgejo admin create-user --username you --admin --password yourpassword --email youremail@example.com`
Please see the deployment repo for the folder structure as well as the [upstream docs](https://forgejo.org/docs/) on how to configure and hack on Forgejo.
Also note that the Makefile will compile Codeberg's Forgejo fork from the `codeberg-test` branch by default. You can override this behaviour by specifying `ORIGIN` and `GITEA_BRANCH` environment to the Makefile.
If you want to help us improve our deployment scripts, check out the [Codeberg-Infrastructure organization](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-Infrastructure). We'd really appreciate moving away from Makefile and shell scripts and ask you to join the discussion there.
If you are interested in supporting this project, feel free to contact us. Some legacy resources or WIP might be still invisible to normal users (although we always try to work publicly when possible).
Please make sure to first understand what the `build-deploy-forgejo` repo does to replicate its function. Also feel free to contact us (for example via Matrix) to ask where to help.
If you fixed an issue specific to Codeberg that should not go into the upstream repo or was refused there, but fits the criteria for our own repo written above, you can file an MR to [our own fork of Forgejo](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/forgejo). Make sure to point your MR to the `codeberg` branch and rebase to the latest commits there. Also explain why this should go into the Codeberg repo, if not obvious.
If you need help or feel stuck, need inspiration or advice, you can always reach out to us in our [Contributing to Codeberg Matrix Channel](https://matrix.to/#/#contributing-to-codeberg:kle.li).
A more comprehensive list of our chatrooms can be found in the [Codeberg Matrix Space](https://matrix.to/#/#codeberg-space:matrix.org).
