# Contributing to MkDocs

An introduction to contributing to the MkDocs project.

The MkDocs project welcomes, and depends, on contributions from developers and users in the open source community. Contributions can be made in a number of ways, a few examples are:

- Code patches via pull requests
- Documentation improvements
- Bug reports and patch reviews

## Reporting an Issue?

Please include as much detail as you can. Let us know your platform and MkDocs version. If the problem is visual (for example a theme or design issue) please add a screenshot and if you get an error please include the the full error and traceback.

## Testing the Development Version

If you want to just install and try out the latest development version of MkDocs you can do so with the following command. This can be useful if you want to provide feedback for a new feature or want to confirm if a bug you have encountered is fixed in the git master. It is strongly recommended that you do this within a virtualenv.

    pip install https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/archive/master.tar.gz

## Installing for Development

First you'll need to fork and clone the repository. Once you have a local copy, run the following command. It is strongly recommended that you do this within a virtualenv.

    pip install --editable .

This will install MkDocs in development mode which binds the `mkdocs` command to the git repository.

## Running the tests

To run the tests, it is recommended that you use Tox. This just needs to be pip installed and then the test suite can be ran for MkDocs but running the command `tox` in the root of your MkDocs repository.

It will attempt to run the tests against all of the Python versions we support. So don't be concerned if you are missing some and they fail. The rest will be verified by Travis when you submit a pull request.

## Submitting Pull Requests

Once you are happy with your changes or you are ready for some feedback, push it to your fork and send a pull request. For a change to be accepted it will most likely need to have tests and documentation if it is a new feature.

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