New Developer Guide
Welcome to the Couchers.org development team! We're looking forward to working with you on building this platform for our community.
The three steps to getting started are:
You don't have to do these in order, so feel free to join the development meetings or schedule a chat when you're ready!
To get started, head to our GitHub repository and find a good first issue to get working on.
Comment on the issue, that you'd like to work on it, and one of the core developers will assign it to you. Feel free to ask any questions in that issue's comments and we'll do our best to help you get going.
Once you're ready, open a Pull Request and core developers will come to review your code.
Start by setting up a development environment, there is a step-by-step guide at https://github.com/Couchers-org/couchers/tree/develop/app#readme. For setting up just the web frontend, you can follow the web readme. We also have a general developer contributor guide outlining the GitHub workflow and other parts. The architecture overview document outlines how the different parts of the app work together. For backend developers, there is an overview of how a request goes through the backend.
We have plenty more documentation in the //docs folder to help you get started. If anything is unclear or you have any trouble, just open an issue and we'll be there to help!
Once you've made a start digging around the codebase and found something to work on, we'd love to meet with you over video call. That way we can get to know each other, and figure out how you can best contribute to the project!
To schedule a meeting, please email Aapeli at aapeli (at) our domain (dot) org.
Once we've met you on video call, we can invite you to Slack and add you as a contributor to the GitHub organization.
We coordinate a lot of our work through meetings. As of September 2025, we meet on Tuesdays at 21:30 UTC. Meeting notes are posted on GitHub after the meeting.
Check first the documentation in the //docs folder. If this doesn't answer your question, open a GitHub issue and ask there, we'll be more than happy to help.