# Contributing to Cheetah

Cheetah is the work of many volunteers. If you use Cheetah, share your experiences, tricks, customizations, and frustrations. Please visit https://github.com/CheetahTemplate3/cheetah3 and file bug reports, feature requests or pull requests.

## Getting the Code

The Cheetah source code is stored in a central Git repository hosted primarily by GitHub. The primary Git repository can be found here.

## Development Process

The typical development workflow for Cheetah revolves around two primary branches maint and next. The next branch is where development planned for the next release of Cheetah is. The maint branch on the otherhand is where backported fixes and patches will be applied for the current release of Cheetah will go, it’s common for a patch to be applied to maint and next at the same time.

Anyone and everyone is encouraged to submit patches at any time, but as far as bugs or feature requests go, we try to file those first in the Cheetah3 Bug Tracker and then they can be organized into particular releases as is necessary.

In addition to the bug tracker, Cheetah uses Github Actions for automating builds and test runs (see: Github Actions for Cheetah).

Prior to the tarballing of a release, all tests must be passing before the next branch is merged down to the Git master branch where the release tarball will actually be created from.

## Filing Bugs

No software is perfect, and unfortunately no bug report is either. If you’ve found yourself faced with a bug in Cheetah, or just have a good idea for a new feature, we kindly ask that you create an issue in the Cheetah3 Bug Tracker.

Some tips for filing a useful bug report, try to include the following:

- A description of what you were trying to do, and what happened (i.e. reproduction steps), the more code you can include the better.

- Any and all tracebacks or compiler errors

- The version of Cheetah you’re using

- The version of Python you’re using

- The operating system you’re running Cheetah on

- Any other pieces of information you might think are relevant