Welcome to Libraries.io 🎉
Here you'll find guidance for contributors to the Libraries.io project as a whole.
Assumptions
We have made the following assumptions in our guidance and documentation:
- that the reader has a basic understanding of the collaborative coding platform GitHub,
- that the reader has a working understanding of the distributed revision control system Git,
- that the reader is able to communicate, in writing, in English.
Why Build Libraries.io?
Our goal is to raise the quality of all software.
We do this by tackling three problems:
- Discovery: Helping developers make faster, more informed decisions about the software that they use.
- Maintainability: Helping maintainers understand more about the software they depend upon and the consumers of their software.
- Sustainability: Supporting undervalued software by providing a scalable and sustainable revenue for maintainers
Libraries.io is the place that we attempt to solve the discovery problem for users, we solve the other two at our parent company Tidelift. If you'd like to know why we think this is the right approach then check out our strategy.
Who are Tidelift?
In October 2017 Libraries.io maintainers Andrew Nesbitt and Benjamin Nickolls decided to join a new company focussed on building a sustainable future for open source software. Tidelift launched to the public in February 2018 and continue to support Libraries.io as part of their core philosophy and strategy.
Who is Libraries.io For?
Libraries.io currently caters for the needs of three groups:
- Google: is hungry for your linked datas so she can serve you up search traffic.
- Searcher: is a developer with a problem, she is looking for something to help solve it.
- Extender: has her own ideas. She wants access to the raw data so that she can mash up her own service and offer it to the world.
These groups have been expanded into personas for contributors to reference in their work.
How Does Libraries.io Work?
Libraries.io collects data about software and the frameworks, plugins and tools they depend upon which we collectively call libraries.
Everything in Libraries.io begins with package managers. On a regular basis, background tasks find new or updated libraries from each of those packages managers. Each library is stored as a project, alongside any data we can gleam from the package manager. If the package manager provides a link to a hosted revision control service like GitHub, then Libraries.io fetches yet more data from there.
Using the collected data, we then calculate the SourceRank, which is used to index the project in search results. Next, we highlight any issues regarding updates, deprecated versions, yanked or deleted libraries, license incompatibilities, etc.
If you'd like an overview of the project, including a description of each of the repositories in the Libraries.io organisation and how they work together, then check out our overview.
How Can I Help?
If you wish to contribute to Libraries.io, you must agree to our code of conduct. In short, it says: be excellent to one another. If you're able to abide by those terms, then check out our contributor's handbook.
Improving This Document
You can view the source for this document and the rest of our documentation on GitHub. You can also view, comment upon and create new issues concerning this documentation on our issue tracker. For more information about contributing to Libraries.io, please read our contributor's handbook.