Contribute to NEST

Here is all documentation pertaining to contributing to NEST.

Note

For documentation relating to C++ source code, see our developer space

NEST draws its strength from the many people that use and improve it. We are happy to consider your contributions (e.g., new models, bug or documentation fixes) for addition to the official version of NEST.

Please familiarize yourself with our guides and workflows!

Have a question, feature request or want to report an issue?

Mailing list

Have a question or problem about NEST? Get help from the NEST community: use our mailing list.

Create a GitHub issue

If you have a feature request, bug report or other issue, create an issue on GitHub using the templates

Contribute code or docs to the NEST project

Before you contribute

• New to git or need a refresher? See our NEST git workflow

• Install NEST from source

• Required development tools

• Review the naming conventions for NEST

• Developing NEST with IDEs

Contribute code, modules, models

• Adding neuron or synapses models to NEST? Consider NESTML: a modeling language supporting neuron and synapse specification, based on the syntax of Python.

• Modifying or adding C++ code? See our developer space

• For making changes to the PyNEST API, see our PyNEST API template

• Writing an extension module? See NEST Extension Module Example

Contribute documentation

• Review the documentation style guide.

• If you have a Python example network to contribute, please refer to our PyNEST example template

• For model contributions, ensure the documentation meets our criteria. For an example, see the model docs in the header file section ‘BeginUserDocs’ for iaf_psc_alpha.

• Check that documentation renders properly: See the build documentation steps.

Before we approve your contribution

• In order that the NEST Initiative can manage the NEST code base in the long term, you need to transfer the copyright by sending us a completed and signed form to contact[at]nest-initiative.org.

  NEST Contributor Agreement

• Reviewers will be assigned to pull-requests. If you are requested to review a pull request, please see our Code review guidelines.

• Continuous integration is used to ensure that NEST runs as expected. All tests must pass before merging. Here you can find details on our CI workflow.