Make your mark on the InfluxDB source

By Philip O'Toole / Use Cases
Nov 05, 2015

InfluxDB is an open-source project, and we rely heavily on the community when it comes to development. Bug reports, performance numbers, and helping each other, as we iterate on the software, are all very helpful. In fact, it is in these ways that the community makes its biggest impact.

Of course, there is another way to contribute to InfluxDB, and that is to actually improve the source code. Knowing that code you wrote will be run by thousands of developers and companies worldwide can be a real source of pride.

Help Wanted!

To help you make your mark on the InfluxDB source code, we on the Core team recently selected a set of issues that we think are the most approachable. All the issues are logged on Github and are marked with the help-wanted label. We have tried to add some introductory notes to each issue to help you get started, and will make a particular effort to answer questions about these issues as you proceed. Some issues are more difficult than others, and have been labelled as such.

Before you start working with the source, be sure to check out the CONTRIBUTING guide to learn how to configure your build enviroment. You will also need to sign the CLA before any of your changes can be merged.

Get your t-shirt

As an added-incentive, anyone whose PR is merged to master will get an InfluxDB t-shirt. Just remind us in the Issue when the change is merged, and we’ll contact you for shipping details. Wear the shirt with pride, knowing your code is running across the world!

So start coding!

We know it can be difficult to get up to speed on a complex code base like InfluxDB, so we hope this will help make it fun. Learning how a time-series database works can be a fascinating experience, and there is no better way to do so than getting into the code. Hopefully these particular issues will help you get going.