Hacktoberfest is back and gr-eight-er than ever!

DigitalOcean is excited to announce the eighth annual Hacktoberfest, our month-long celebration of the open-source community. DigitalOcean continually strives to support open-source foundations, projects, and maintainers, and in the 2021 edition of Hacktoberfest, we’re excited to announce new initiatives that further our commitment to the open-source community.

In the past eight years, Hacktoberfest has grown from an initial group of 676 participants to over 150,000 open source enthusiasts who show their support by contributing quality pull requests, participating in global events, and more. As always, we welcome all members of our global community to participate, including those who are just getting started in open source. Read on to learn more about how you can participate in Hacktoberfest 2021!

New for 2021

At the core of Hacktoberfest is a commitment to supporting open-source projects and a desire to provide meaningful connections within the community. We’ve introduced several new features to ensure these values are reflected throughout Hacktoberfest, including new ways for people to get involved without submitting pull requests. Here’s what’s new for 2021:

Showing the love to maintainers

Maintainers are the backbone of the open-source community and this year, we’re focused more than ever on ensuring maintainers are receiving the love they deserve. Our maintainer-friendly rules include allowing repos to opt-in to Hacktoberfest, ensuring only accepted pull requests count towards participants’ Hacktoberfest goals, and for the first time ever, enabling maintainers to receive a Hacktoberfest t-shirt without having to submit pull requests.

Contribute via open source donations

We’re excited to be expanding the ways our community can support open source and are enabling donations through Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors which go directly to your favorite open source project. Open source projects are always in need of financial support in order to develop new features, cover expenses, and continue their regular activities, and you’ll be able to explore and donate to open source projects right from the Hacktoberfest website. Remember, open-source projects of all sizes are in need of funding, so we encourage donations to a variety of projects.

We’re excited by this important new element of Hacktoberfest and donations of any amount are appreciated!

Submit merge requests via GitLab

We’re excited to announce that we’ve added GitLab support for Hacktoberfest this year. This means that in addition to pull requests via GitHub, your quality merge requests submitted through GitLab will now also count towards your Hacktoberfest goals. This has been a highly requested feature from the community and we’re excited to have GitLab on board for Hacktoberfest no.8.

Only contributions to repositories on GitLab that have “hacktoberfest” as a topic will count. Besides following the guidelines on the Hacktoberfest site, there is nothing additional that GitLab open source maintainers or contributors need to do to join in on the Hacktoberfest fun.

How to participate in Hacktoberfest 2021

Hacktoberfest is open to anyone around the world who wants to take part–whether you are an experienced open source contributor or have never contributed to an open-source project before, you’re welcome at Hacktoberfest! To qualify for a free, limited-edition Hacktoberfest t-shirt, you must contribute 4 accepted pull requests to opted-in repos, but we encourage participation of all levels–you can also participate by completing a single PR, making a donation to your favorite open-source project, organizing or attending a virtual event.

You can read the full rules of participation, view upcoming virtual events, and register to participate in Hacktoberfest on this website. If you’d like to contribute directly to your favorite open source project, please donate through this link.

Hacktoberfest wouldn’t be possible without the support of our partners, who have exciting Hacktoberfest activities planned, Intel, Appwrite, and DeepSource. And of course, it wouldn’t be Hacktoberfest without the participation from you, the DigitalOcean community! We can’t wait to see what you contribute in our eighth and greatest year yet.

Happy hacking!

Phoebe Quincy, Senior Community Relations Manager