Publishing Your Code

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A healthy open source project needs a place to publish its code and project management stuff so other developers can collaborate with you. This lets your users gain a better understanding of your code, keep up with new developments, report bugs, and contribute code.

This development web site should include the source code history itself, a bug tracker, a patch submission (aka “Pull Request”) queue, and possibly additional developer-oriented documentation.

There are several free open source project hosting sites (aka “forges”). These include GitHub, SourceForge, Bitbucket, and GitLab. GitHub is currently the best. Use GitHub.

Creating a Project Repo on GitHub

To publish your Python project on GitHub:

1. Create a GitHub account if you don’t already have one.
2. Create a new repo for your project.
   1. Click on the “+” menu next to your avatar in the upper right of the page and choose “New repository”.
   2. Name it after your project and give it an SEO-friendly description.
   3. If you don’t have an existing project repo, choose the settings to add a README, .gitignore, and license. Use the Python .gitignore option.
3. On the newly created repo page, click “Manage topics” and add the tags “python” and “python3” and/or “python2” as appropriate.
4. Include a link to your new GitHub repo in your project’s README file so people who just have the project distribution know where to find it.

If this is a brand new repo, clone it to your local machine and start working:

$ git clone https://github.com/<username>/<projectname>

Or, if you already have a project Git repo, add your new GitHub repo as a remote:

$ cd <projectname>
$ git remote add origin https://github.com/<username>/<projectname>
$ git push --tags

When Your Project Grows

For more information about managing an open source software project, see the book Producing Open Source Software.