I’m in! Now what?
Join the OpenAssistant Contributors Discord Server!,
this is for work coordination.
Join the LAION Discord Server!, it has
a dedicated channel and is more public.
and / or the YK Discord Server, also has a
dedicated, but not as active, channel.
Visit the Notion
Taking on Tasks
We have a growing task list of
issues. Find an issue that
appeals to you and make a comment that you'd like to work on it. Include in your
comment a brief description of how you'll solve the problem and if there are any
open questions you want to discuss. Once a project coordinator has assigned the
issue to you, start working on it.
If the issue is currently unclear but you are interested, please post in Discord
and someone can help clarify the issue in more detail.
Always Welcome: Documentation markdowns in docs/
, docstrings, diagrams of
the system architecture, and other documentation.
Submitting Work
We're all working on different parts of Open Assistant together. To make
contributions smoothly we recommend the following:
- Fork this project repository
and clone it to your local machine. (Read more
About Forks)
- Before working on any changes, try to
sync the forked repository
to keep it up-to-date with the upstream repository.
- On a
new branch
in your fork (aka a "feature branch" and not main
) work on a small focused
change that only touches on a few files.
- Run
pre-commit
and make sure all files have formatting fixed. This
simplifies life for reviewers.
- Package up a small bit of work that solves part of the problem
into a Pull Request
and
send it out for review.
Here is an example PR
for this project to illustrate this flow.
- If you're lucky, we can merge your change into
main
without any problems.
If there are changes to files you're working on, resolve them by:
- First try to rebase as suggested
in these instructions.
- If rebasing feels too painful, merge as suggested
in these instructions.
- Once you've resolved conflicts (if any), finish the review and
squash and merge
your PR (when squashing try to clean up or update the individual commit
messages to be one sensible single one).
- Merge in your change and move on to a new issue or the second step of your
current issue.
Additionally, if someone is working on an issue that interests you, ask if they
need help on it or would like suggestions on how to approach the issue. If so,
share wildly. If they seem to have a good handle on it, let them work on their
solution until a challenge comes up.
Tips
- At any point you can compare your feature branch to the upstream/main of
LAION-AI/Open-Assistant
by using a URL like this:
https://github.com/LAION-AI/Open-Assistant/compare/main...andrewm4894:Open-Assistant:my-example-feature-branch.
Obviously just replace andrewm4894
with your own GitHub user name and
my-example-feature-branch
with whatever you called the feature branch you
are working on, so something like
https://github.com/LAION-AI/Open-Assistant/compare/main...<your_github_username>:Open-Assistant:<your_branch_name>
.
This will show the changes that would appear in a PR, so you can check this to
make sure only the files you have changed or added will be part of the PR.
- Try not to work on the
main
branch in your fork - ideally you can keep this
as just an updated copy of main
from LAION-AI/Open-Assistant
.
- If your feature branch gets messed up, just update the
main
branch in your
fork and create a fresh new clean "feature branch" where you can add your
changes one by one in separate commits or all as a single commit.
When does a review finish
A review finishes when all blocking comments are addressed and at least one
owning reviewer has approved the PR. Be sure to acknowledge any non-blocking
comments either by making the requested change, explaining why it's not being
addressed now, or filing an issue to handle it later.
Developer Setup
Work is organized in the
project board.
Anything that is in the Todo
column and not assigned, is up for grabs.
Meaning we'd be happy for anyone to do these tasks.
If you want to work on something, assign yourself to it or write a comment that
you want to work on it and what you plan to do.
- There's an introduction for developers that
gives an overview of the different tools and technologies used in the project.
- To get started with development, if you want to work on the backend, have a
look at backend/README.md
.
- If you want to work on any frontend, have a look at
website/README.md
.
There is also a minimal implementation of a frontend in the text-frontend
folder.
We are using Python 3.10 for the backend.
Check out the
High-Level Protocol Architecture
Website
The website is built using Next.js and is in the website
folder.
Pre-commit
We are using pre-commit
to enforce code style and formatting.
Install pre-commit
from its website and run
pre-commit install
to install the pre-commit hooks.
In case you haven't done this, have already committed, and CI is failing, you
can run pre-commit run --all-files
to run the pre-commit hooks on all files.
Deployment
Upon making a release on GitHub, all docker images are automatically built and
pushed to ghcr.io. The docker images are tagged with the release version and the
latest
tag. Further, the ansible playbook in ansible/dev.yaml
is run to
automatically deploy the built release to the dev machine.
Contribute a Dataset
See
here
Translations
To add translations, you can manually edit the JSON translation files in
website/public/locales
, use the inlang online editor,
or run npm run inlang:lint
inside website
to find missing translations.