How To Contribute

You are very welcome to contribute! PyInstaller is a maintained by a group of volunteers. All contributions, like community support, bug reports, bug fixes, documentation improvements, enhancements and ideas are welcome.

PyInstaller is an free software project that is created and maintained by volunteers. It lives-and-dies based on the support it receives from others, and the fact that you’re even considering contributing to PyInstaller is very generous of you.

Since as of now all core-developers are working on PyInstaller in their spare-time, you can help us (and the project) most if you are following some simple guidelines. The higher the quality of your contribution, the less work we have incorporating them and the earlier we will be able to incorporate them :-)

If you get stuck at any point you can ask on the PyInstaller Email List or create a ticket on GitHub.

For more about our development process and methods, see the Development Guide.

Some ideas how you can help

Some ideas how you can help:

  • Subscribe to the mailing list (low traffic) or join the IRC channel and share your experience or answer questions from the community.
  • Answer support tickets: Often the user just needs to be pointed to the fitting section in the manual.
  • Triage open issues, which means: read the report; ask the issue requester to provide missing information and to try with the latest development version; ensure there is a minimal example; ensure the issue-reporter followed all steps in When Things Go Wrong. If you are able reproduce the problem and track down the bug, this would be a great help for the core developers.
  • Help improving the documentation: There is a list of documentation issues you can pick one from. Please provide a pull-request for your changes. Read more »»
  • Pick an issue requesting a pull-request and provide one.
  • Review pull requests: Are the commit messages following the guideline Please Write Good Commit Messages; do all new files have a copyright-header (esp. for hooks this is often missing); is the code okay; etc.
  • Scan the list of open issues and pick some task :-)

Thank you very much!

If you plan to contribute frequently, just ask for write access to the main git repository. We would be glad to welcome you in the team!

Sponsorship and Project Grant

Please consider sponsoring PyInstaller development, especially if your company benefits from this project.

We welcome your patronage on Bountysource:

  • Contribute a recurring amount to the team
  • Place a bounty on a specific feature

Your contribution will go towards adding new features to PyInstaller and making sure all functionality continues to meet our high quality standards.

A grant for contiguous full-time development has the biggest impact for progress. Periods of 3 to 10 days allow a contributor to tackle substantial complex issues which are otherwise left to linger until somebody can’t afford to not fix them.

Contact Hartmut Goebel to arrange a grant for a core contributor.

Huge thanks to all the companies and individuals who financially contributed to the development of PyInstaller. Please send a PR if you’ve donated and would like to be listed on the web-site.