Hacktoberfest has now officially started. Registrations are open and developers have begun submitting their pull requests. If you're planning to participate in Hacktoberfest, either as a contributor or maintainer, there are a few things you might like to do in order to get ready.

Let's take a look.

Register

The first thing to do is to register for Hacktoberfest. Registrations are now open via the website and this will get you all geared up to participate. You'll need to register to participate in Hacktoberfest, even if you are planning to participate as a contributor or maintainer.

1. Head to the Hacktoberfest website and click "Start Hacking" or "Registration now open".

2. You should be taken to an authentication page where you can choose how you'd like to participate:

3. Click "Initiate" and you'll be taken to a login page to authenticate your account.

4. Follow the instructions on screen. Once your account is authenticated, you should be back at the Hacktoberfest website.

5. Enter your name and select the email you'd like to use for the hackathon:

6. Fill out the rest of the form, entering information on how you'd like to participate and more:

7. When you're done, click "Register".

8. You should be taken to your profile page where you should see 0/4 PRs:

This means you're all signed up and ready to hack!

Join the community

Next, you'll want to join the Hacktoberfest Discord to stay up to date. You can chat to other participants as well as the Hacktoberfest organisers. There's lots of information in the Discord about contributing, getting help, and sharing the Hacktoberfest ❤️

Just remember to follow the guidelines for being a good community member.

Get ready to participate as a contributor

Most of you who are reading this post are probably planning to participate in Hacktoberfest as a contributor. If you're a maintainer, check out some tips below on how to get ready as a maintainer.

Brush up on your skills and contributor knowledge

If you've already signed up as above, then sweet. You're ready to hack when it hits October. But before you get into the contributing side of things, it's a good idea to brush up on your contribution knowledge. The Hacktoberfest team has put together a bunch of resources to help you get ready.

Things like how to contribute to open source and brushing up on your GitHub knowledge through GitHub Skills and the Top Tips for using GitHub.

Refreshing your knowledge on these things will make it a lot easier when it comes to contributing to projects during Hacktoberfest.

Start looking for projects

If you haven't started looking for projects to contribute to during Hacktoberfest, now is a good time to start looking. You'll need to make sure projects have the Hacktoberfest label.

You can check out the list of all the GitHub projects participating in Hacktoberfest. There are almost 100,000! If you are having trouble narrowing it down, think about open source projects that you use on a daily basis. Here are four projects and three projects I contributed to last year to get you started.

GitHub also has some open source projects that are tagged for Hacktoberfest. You can read about them here on DEV.

Participate in events

As well as hacking online, there are a tonne of events you can participate in, both IRL and virtual. Check out the Hacktoberfest events page to find one near you.

Get ready to participate as a maintainer

Hacktoberfest can be a tricky time for maintainers as you'll be dealing with lots of new pull requests. There's a few things you might want to do to make it easier for your community to participate, and therefore less stress on merging PRs!

You can do these things in any order!

Add the Hacktoberfest topic

If you are planning to make your project eligible for contributors to participate in for Hacktoberfest, you'll need to add the Hacktoberfest label to your repository:

1. Go to the "Code" tab in your repository.

2. Click the settings cog next to "About" on the right hand side:

3. Under "Topics" type "Hacktoberfest" and click "Save changes":

Now you're repository is ready to accept pull requests for Hacktoberfest.

Clean up your repo

Before you start accepting a bunch of pull requests for Hacktoberfest, take a moment to clean up your repository. Are there a bunch of old issues that could be closed? Are there PRs waiting to be merged?

Spending a few minutes ensuring your project is clean and ready to go will make it a lot easier to accept new PRs.

Add good-first-issues

To encourage new contributors to participate in your project, it's a great idea to add the good-first-issues label to issues that are good for first time contributors. This will mean newbies will have somewhere to start.

Contour talked about the benefit of good-first-issues and how it can help bring new contributors up to speed.

Don't forget, Hacktoberfest 2022 encourages non-code contributions. So make sure there are good-first-issues for things like documentation and design too.

Ensure your documentation is up to date

If you want to encourage new contributors, and you want to make your life a whole lot easier, make sure your documentation is up to date. I mean things like:

• README
• Contribution guidelines
• Getting started
• Code of Conduct

These docs will help set the standard for contributors and will give them guidelines on how to contribute to your project. Trust us, it makes it a lot easier to be able to reject a PR because it didn't follow the guidelines!

If you've done all these things (in any order) your project should be all ready to accept contributions for Hacktoberfest 🥳

Have fun

The most important thing to remember when it comes to Hacktoberfest (or any hackathon) is to have fun! Be respectful to the community, don't submit spammy PRs, make meaningful contributions, ask questions, make friends, and you should have an awesome time.

Happy hacking 🎉