Contributing to Apache Arrow

Thanks for your interest in the Apache Arrow project.

Arrow is a large project and may seem overwhelming when you’re first getting involved. Contributing code is great, but that’s probably not the first place to start. There are lots of ways to make valuable contributions to the project and community.

This page provides some orientation for how to get involved. It also offers some recommendations on how to get the best results when engaging with the community.

Code of Conduct

All participation in the Apache Arrow project is governed by the ASF’s Code of Conduct.

Community

A good first step to getting involved in the Arrow project is to join the mailing lists and participate in discussions where you can.

Apache Arrow Community

Bug reports

Alerting us to unexpected behavior and missing features, even if you can’t solve the problems yourself, help us understand and prioritize work to improve the libraries.

Bugs and Features

Communicating through the mailing lists

Projects in The Apache Software Foundation (“the ASF”) use public, archived mailing lists to create a public record of each project’s development activities and decision-making process.

While lacking the immediacy of chat or other forms of communication, the mailing lists give participants the opportunity to slow down and be thoughtful in their responses, and they help developers who are spread across many timezones to participate more equally.

Read more on the Apache Arrow Community page.

Improve documentation

A great way to contribute to the project is to improve documentation. If you found some docs to be incomplete or inaccurate, share your hard-earned knowledge with the rest of the community.

Documentation improvements are also a great way to gain some experience with our submission and review process, discussed below, without requiring a lot of local development environment setup. In fact, many documentation-only changes can be made directly in the GitHub web interface by clicking the “edit” button. This will handle making a fork and a pull request for you.

New Contributors

First time contributing?

The New Contributor’s Guide provides necessary information for contributing to the Apache Arrow project.

New Contributor’s guide

Overview

A short overview of the contributing process we follow and some additional information you might need if you are not new to the contributing process in general.

Contributing overview

Language specific

Connection to the specific language development pages:

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Glossary

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Bug reports and feature requests