Contributing to GitBook

For help, support and product questions, head to our GitHub Community.

Thanks for helping make GitBook better. This repository holds the open source renderer behind every published GitBook site, and the team reads everything that comes in here.

Ways to contribute

Open an issue. Report a bug, suggest a feature, or tell us when something feels off. This is the most useful thing you can do.
Join the conversation. Share ideas and help others in GitHub Community.
Build with GitBook. Publish your docs, try new features early, and tell us what works and what doesn't.

Issues instead of pull requests

Pull requests are limited to the GitBook team. If you've found a bug or want something to change, please open an issue instead.

This isn't because we don't want your help. Every change here ships to every published GitBook site, so we need to own each one from start to finish. A clear issue often helps us more than a pull request: it tells us what's wrong and why, and lets us fix it in a way that fits the rest of the codebase.

A good issue includes:

What you expected to happen, and what happened instead
A link to a published GitBook site that shows the problem, if you have one
Steps to reproduce it, plus screenshots or a recording for anything visual
Your browser and OS, if it looks like it might matter

Before opening one, search existing issues. If someone has already reported it, add a 👍 or any extra details you have.

Already fixed it in your fork? Link the branch or commit in your issue. We may open a pull request from it, and your commits keep your name.

If you open a pull request anyway, we'll close it and point you here. Nothing personal, and we'd still love the issue.

Reach out

Not sure if it's a bug? Have a half-formed idea? Open an issue or start a discussion anyway. We'd much rather hear from you than not, and no report is too small.

Spotted a wrong or missing translation? Open an issue with the string and the wording you'd suggest.

Using AI

You're welcome to use AI to help you write an issue. Please read and check what it produces before you post: reports that are long, vague or unverified take time away from fixing real problems, and we may close them without a reply.

Running locally

You don't need a local setup to open an issue, but it can help you reproduce a problem or self-host the renderer.

Prerequisites

Node.js (see "engines" in package.json)
Bun (see "packageManager" in package.json)

Setup

Use the project's version of Node:

nvm use

Install dependencies:

bun install

Start the development server:

bun dev

Other commands:

bun lint: Lint the code using Oxlint
bun lint:fix: Automatically fix lint issues using Oxlint
bun format: Format the code using Oxfmt
bun format:check: Check formatting without changing files
bun typecheck: Run TypeScript type checking
bun unit: Run unit tests
bun e2e: Run end-to-end tests

Preview a site

With the development server running, any published GitBook site can be rendered through your local version at http://localhost:3000/url/<published-url>. For example, visit http://localhost:3000/url/gitbook.com/docs to see our own docs.

The site must be published publicly to render locally.

License

The renderer is distributed under the GNU GPLv3 License. If you distribute the code, you must keep the source code public. To use it in a private repository, you need a commercial license.

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