How to Contribute

We encourage contributions and feedback from the community! This project was created by Mac Admins, for Mac Admins—your input, questions, and improvements help make it better for everyone. If you see something that can be improved, have an idea, or spot an issue, please speak up and get involved.

Operating Rules

These operating rules describe and govern NIST’s management of this repository and contributors’ responsibilities. NIST reserves the right to modify this policy at any time.

Criteria for Contributions and Feedback

This is a moderated platform. NIST will only accept contributions that comply with the terms of the license file. Contributors may submit links or materials for hosting in the repository. Upon submission, materials will be public and considered publicly available information, unless noted in the license file.

NIST reserves the right to reject, remove, or edit any contribution or feedback, including anything that:

States or implies NIST endorsement of any entities, services, or products
Is inaccurate
Contains abusive or vulgar content, spam, hate speech, personal attacks, or similar content
Is clearly “off topic”
Makes unsupported accusations
Includes personally identifiable or business identifiable information according to Department of Commerce Office of Privacy and Open Government guidelines
Contains .exe or .jar file types

Contributor Responsibilities

NIST also reserves the right to reject or remove contributions from the repository if the contributor fails to carry out any of the following responsibilities:

Following the contribution instructions
Responding to feedback from other repository users in a timely manner
Responding to NIST representatives in a timely manner
Keeping contributions and contributor GitHub username up to date

Contributing

All requests for changes and enhancements are initiated through the project’s GitHub issue tracker. To initiate a request, please create a new issue. The following issue templates exist for creating a new issue:

Issue Type	Use For
Feature Request	Describe a new feature or capability to be added to the project
Bug Report	Report a problem with an existing feature or capability
Question	Ask a question about the project

The core project team regularly reviews the open issues, prioritizes their handling, and updates the issue statuses and comments as needed.

Feature Request or Bug Report Process

A good feature request or bug report will help our team assess the issue submitted.

Great Bug Reports or Feature Requests tend to have:

A quick summary and/or background information
Steps to reproduce
- Be specific!
- Provide sample code if you can
- Include all relevant setup
What you expected would happen
What actually happens (if it’s a bug report)
Any additional notes

Contributing Code

The macOS Security Compliance Project uses a typical GitHub fork and pull request workflow. To establish a development environment for contributing to the project, you must do the following:

Comment on the issue

Before you start working on a fix, leave a comment in the issue that you’re working on the fix so other contributors know it’s in progress.
Fork the repository

Fork the macOS Security Compliance Project repository to your personal workspace. See the GitHub guide on forking a repository for details.
Create a feature branch

Create a feature branch from the appropriate macOS version branch for making changes. You can create a branch in your personal repository directly on GitHub or using a Git client.
Make your modifications

Add, remove, and change content in the branch, then stage your changes using git add and git rm commands.
Commit your changes

Include a commit message describing the nature of your changes. You can reference an issue using the hash symbol (e.g., #34).
Terminal window
```
git commit -m "Added new feature X which supports Y addressing issue #34"
```
Push to your fork
Terminal window
```
git push
```
Create a pull request

Make sure to link the pull request to an issue using a keyword.

Contributor License Agreement

By contributing, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC BY 4.0).

Next Steps

FAQ - Frequently asked questions
Resources - Additional resources and links