If you are here, it means you are interested in helping us out. A hearty welcome and thank you! There are many ways you can contribute to the ML.NET project:

• Offer PR's to fix bugs or implement new features.
• Give us feedback and bug reports regarding the software or the documentation.
• Improve our examples, tutorials, and documentation.

We've created a separate bucket of issues, which would be great candidates for community members to contribute to. You can find them in the help wanted issue list.

Within that set, we have additionally marked issues which are good candidates for first-time contributors. Those do not require too much familiarity with the codebase and are more novice-friendly. See the good first issue list.

If there is some other area not included here where you want to contribute to, first open an issue to describe the problem you are trying to solve and state that you're willing to contribute a fix for it. We will then discuss in that issue, if this is an issue we would like addressed and the best approach to solve it.

Every public API addition, modification, or removal must be proposed and explicitly approved in a GitHub issue before implementation or opening an implementation pull request. This includes protected APIs available to consumers through inheritance and APIs in preview or experimental packages.

For changes requiring review, follow the API review process to prepare a proposal, discuss it with maintainers, and obtain a recorded approval with the api-approved label. Linking an issue alone is not approval; api-suggestion and api-ready-for-review do not authorise implementation. Link the approval comment in the eventual pull request and implement the approved design.

If you are new to GitHub, see the GitHub documentation for contributing to projects.

As a first time contributor, you will be invited to sign the Contributor License Agreement (CLA). Please follow the instructions of the dotnet foundation bot reviewer on your PR to sign the agreement indicating that you have appropriate rights to your contribution.

Your pull request needs to reference a filed issue. Please fill in the template that is populated for the pull request. Only pull requests addressing small typos can have no issues associated with them.

An ML.NET team member will be assigned to your pull request once the continuous integration checks have passed successfully.

All commits in a pull request will be squashed to a single commit with the original creator as author.

See Contributing for information about coding styles, source structure, making pull requests, and more.

See the Developer Guide for details about developing in this repo.