5 must-haves for open-source success: how great docs and community drive developer adoption

Building and maintaining an open-source project is hard. It is even harder when you are a solo maintainer or have a very small team. This article includes 5 top tips that you can follow to have a successful and thriving open-source project.

To begin, clearly outline your goals for the project. Whether you aim to increase monthly active users (MAU), enhance the product, or expand the community, having a clear direction is crucial.

Remember that an open-source project should truly embrace openness. It should be receptive to feedback, welcoming to contributions, and open to improvements.

All the successful projects that you see today (or even use today) have these 5 things:

1. Write good documentation

Building a technical project and writing documentation for it should be a simultaneous process. You might be building the most helpful solution out there, but without documentation, you won’t be able to onboard developers. We all know that documentation can be an extensive process, and to ease your job, you should opt for tools that make it easier for you to document, manage, and build effective documentation.

If you're looking for tips on writing good documentation, check out this article I wrote on “5 Tips to Write Good Developer Documentation”.

Once you know how to write documentation well, you should find a tool that:

• Offers a great developer experience

• Includes AI features like assisted writing, search, and support assistance

• Supports markdown

• Syncs with GitHub (so people can contribute to your docs)

• Provides interactive code blocks and API playgrounds

Docs by Hashnode offers all of it along with a free lifetime access for all open-source projects.

If you would like to see more of Docs by Hashnode, watch this webinar here 👇

2. Build a community

Community forms the foundation for most open-source projects. They not only help you give direction to your product and build it, but also help you reach your target audience through word of mouth. A lot of open-source tools that I use today are because someone told me, “Oh, you should use this open-source alternative.” Invest time in building that community.

Key things that work out are:

• Being empathetic with your community members. Making them feel welcome and heard.

• Setting up channels for them to communicate. It does not need to be something fancy. You can start with GitHub discussions and then maybe move to Discord or any forum of choice.

• Communication. Communicate with your community members about the roadmap, the features you are shipping, and the problems you are facing. They will feel like they are a part of it, and that is what the true open-source spirit is about.

3. Be active and responsive

Maintaining an open-source project is challenging, and staying consistent is particularly tough. However, the health of your project relies on how active it is.

Here are some methods to maintain activity:

• Push frequent updates.

• Publish changelogs monthly/weekly.

• Respond to bug reports or feature requests.

Although these tasks may seem daunting, you can use tools and automation to assist you.

For instance, if you have bug reports or feature requests and users are waiting to be assigned, you can implement a GitHub bot that assigns users to issues when they use a command like /assign or /take.

Here’s what the Kubernetes community does:

4. Be “open”

The entire idea of open-source is to collaborate, have more people contribute, and support the community.

Some must-haves while building your open-source projects are:

• A good README - Contributors and users should know what your project is about and how to use it from the start, which is why a good README is essential.

• Have a contributing guide - You want more contributors to contribute to your project and improve it. The best way to do that is by writing a contributing guide. Follow this guide by GitHub to learn how to write one.

• Have a License - Include an open-source license that allows others to use, copy, modify, and contribute to your project. This is the first thing you should do when creating an open-source project. Read more about it here.

5. Have automations in place

CI/CD is an important concept in software development and helps to avoid bugs and code failures. Since it requires less human intervention, it is even more important in open-source projects.

One of the most common examples of CI is: Each time you receive a pull request, the tests are automatically run, and it clearly shows if all the tests pass with the new patch or if something needs to be fixed. This is useful for both contributors and maintainers. You get to maintain a certain quality for PRs, and even contributors get to know if something is breaking or not.

Here’s a list of CI services that you can use for your projects 👇

Ending notes

Maintaining an open-source project is a big feat, and I am proud of each one of you for your contributions. However, it requires a lot of commitment and patience to get the first big hit. The worst part of open-source is having a great product, high monthly active users, and checking all the boxes for a good open-source project, yet not having enough funds to run it.

We, at Hashnode, are doing our part to contribute to the open-source community. We recently launched our documentation tool - Docs by Hashnode, and we are offering it for free to all open-source projects (of any size and number).

All you need to do is fill out the form below, and either I or somebody from the team will reach out to you!