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.
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.
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.
- 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 replaceandrewm4894
with your own GitHub user name andmy-example-feature-branch
with whatever you called the feature branch you are working on, so something likehttps://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 ofmain
fromLAION-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.
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.
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.
- To get started with development, if you want to work on the backend, have a
look at
scripts/backend-development/README.md
. - If you want to work on any frontend, have a look at
scripts/frontend-development/README.md
to make a backend available.
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
The website is built using Next.js and is in the website
folder.
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.
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.
See here