How to contribute

OpenSSL development happens on GitHub. Pull requests are reviewed by Committers, signed off, and merged via a fixed approval pipeline. The authoritative document is CONTRIBUTING.md; this section summarizes and points to the relevant code.

Where to start

If you want to…	Read
Open a PR for the first time	development-workflow
Run the test suite or write a new test	testing
Track down a bug or learn the tracing facility	debugging
Match the project's style	patterns-and-conventions
Understand the build system	tooling and reference/build-system

The PR pipeline

1. Fork openssl/openssl on GitHub. Do not push directly to the upstream.
2. Open a PR against master. (Backports to release branches are usually handled by maintainers via cherry-pick.)
3. CI runs across Linux, macOS, Windows, BSDs, and a small zoo of compilers and configurations (see .github/workflows/ci.yml). Clean builds are required.
4. The PR enters the approval: review pending state. Two committer approvals move it to approval: done. After 24 hours (the cooling-off window) the label changes to approval: ready to merge. At some point a committer merges it.
5. Reviewers may request changes at any time. Use fixup commits (git commit --fixup <hash>); they are squashed at merge.

The list of Committers lives at https://openssl-library.org/about/committers/index.html.

CLA and trivial-change policy

Anything non-trivial requires a Contributor License Agreement. For trivial changes (typos, comment fixes), put a line CLA: trivial in your commit message body. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the canonical text.

Where the rules are enforced

Concern	Enforced by
C formatting (WebKit clang-format)	.clang-format, .pre-commit-config.yaml, .github/workflows/style-checks.yml, util/reformat-patches.sh
Spelling	.codespellrc, .github/workflows/style-checks.yml
Documentation lint	make doc-nits (script: util/find-doc-nits)
Public symbol bookkeeping	make update regenerates util/libcrypto.num, util/libssl.num, util/providers.num, error code maps
News changelog	.github/workflows/check-news-changes.yml reminds you to add an entry in CHANGES.md for user-visible changes
FIPS module fingerprint	.github/workflows/fips-checksums.yml (touching providers/fips.module.sources re-runs the checksumming)
Pull-request template	.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md

Coding policy and documentation policy

The official policies are at:

• https://openssl-library.org/policies/technical/coding-style/
• https://openssl-library.org/policies/technical/documentation-policy/

The local mirror enforces the coding style via .clang-format (WebKit base, customized in .clang-format) and .pre-commit-config.yaml. Run before pushing:

pre-commit run --all-files
# or, for an existing patch series:
util/reformat-patches.sh

Where to ask

Channel	What for
GitHub issues	Bugs, feature requests
openssl-users mailing list	User-level questions
openssl-project mailing list	Project / governance discussions
#openssl on Libera.Chat IRC	Live chat

SUPPORT.md lists all of them with current URLs.