How to contribute

The official process is the contributing guide on the docs site. CONTRIBUTING.md in the repo root is a one-line pointer to that page. This wiki section captures the parts a developer cares about while working in the codebase.

Pickup workflow

1. Fork on GitHub, branch off master.
2. Run uv sync --all-extras --group dev (or PDM equivalent) to install everything tests need.
3. Make changes. Touch fastapi/, the corresponding tests, and any tutorial example under docs_src/ if the change is observable in user examples.
4. Run bash scripts/lint.sh and bash scripts/test.sh locally.
5. Open the PR. CI runs the same lint + tests, plus build-redistribute, docs build, and the smokeshow coverage uploader.

Definition of done

• Tests cover the change. The pyproject coverage source includes fastapi, tests, and docs_src — touching docs_src/ typically requires a matching test under tests/test_tutorial/.
• bash scripts/lint.sh passes (mypy + ty + ruff).
• For changes to public API, a release-notes entry is not added by hand — github-actions[bot] regenerates 📝 Update release notes commits via .github/workflows/latest-changes.yml.
• For changes to translated content, the notify-translations.yml workflow opens issues in language-specific tracking threads.

What to read before changing each area

If you're touching…	Read first
fastapi/applications.py	Application core
fastapi/routing.py	Routing
fastapi/dependencies/	Dependency injection
fastapi/openapi/	OpenAPI generation
fastapi/security/	Security
fastapi/_compat/	Pydantic compatibility
tests/	Testing
docs_src/	Tooling — the docs build and translation pipeline

Sub-pages

• Development workflow
• Testing
• Debugging
• Patterns and conventions
• Tooling