Popular PnP repositories and how to get started contributing2021/02/old2021-02-07_15-23-01.gif

Introduction

In August of 2019, I wrote a post called My GitHub cheat sheet for PnP contributions — an interactive cheat sheet which explains the GitHub commands that I use when I start a contribution. The post is interactive: you just tell it your GitHub username and what repository you want to contribute to, and it customizes the instructions for you.

NOTE: I have since updated the interactive cheat sheet to a Summary Cheat Sheet with all the same interactive steps, but without all the lengthy explanation.

I also wrote another post talking about how impressed I am with David Warner II’s offer to help anyone with their first contribution. I have since joined the Sharing is Caring initiative and proudly co-host all the session with David Warner

After briefly chatting with David I realized that the biggest hurdle for people is that they just don’t know where to get started. In my post, I recommend that you read the contribution guidelines for every repo, but I found that they are often hard to find in each repository.

I also say that most repositories want you to start from the dev branch, but as the Chris Kent pointed out in the August 22nd PnP community call, some repositories prefer you use the master (or, more and more commonly, the main) branch.

So, with David’s help, we compiled a list of the most common PnP repositories to help you get started. We only show the repositories that provide contribution guidelines.

The list contains the following:

• Repo: Name of the repository
• What is it?: Description of the repository
• Getting started: Links to the most likely resource if you want to get started contributing to that repository
• Branch: The branch you should target when submitting your pull requests

NOTE: The information in each of the repositories can change and that you should always refer to the repository for the latest information.

Popular repositories

Conclusion

Let’s keep this list up to date! If you find that we forgot a repository, or that something is wrong, let us know in the comments of via Twitter and we’ll get it updated!

Thanks to David Warner II with putting together this list, and for always making yourself available to help people in this community.

This list wouldn’t be possible without the hard work of all of those who contributed (and continue to contribute) to the above repositories. Thank you for your contributions!

Photo credit

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Updates

• January 3, 2022: Removed duplicated PnPjs. Thanks to Patrick de Lanoy for noticing and letting me know!
• November 8, 2021: Added Power Platform Connectors.
• May 24, 2021: Added Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents Samples and updated contribution guidelines for SPFx Web Parts and SPFx Extensions
• April 24, 2021: Added Power Fx Samples and updated contribution guidelines for SPFx Web Parts and SPFx Extensions
• October 18, 2020: There was so much interest around the Microsoft Graph Toolkit repo that I also added the Microsoft Graph repos. Thanks Jeremy Thake for giving me a list of repos.
• October 15, 2020: Microsoft Graph Toolkit accepts contributions now! Woo hoo!
• October 13, 2020: Thanks to Nanddeep Nachan for pointing out I had forgotten to list the PnP/Teams-dev-samples!
• October 12, 2020: The Office 365 CLI is now called the CLI for Microsoft 365. Added Microsoft365DSC as per Dean Gross‘s suggestion.
• July 27, 2020: Updated repos within PnP organization.
• April 03, 2020: Yes, both the SPFx extensions and web parts samples repositories now ask you to submit to the master branch. This article was updated accordingly.
• March 03, 2020: This repository is getting a lot of traffic these days, so I figured I’d update it and add the super-useful microsoft-365-community repo
• November 22, 2019: I’m incredibly proud to be part of the Sharing is Caring initiative, where we walk people through the process of contributing to open-source repositories and show people how to create their first pull request! If you haven’t done so yet, sign up.
• September 25, 2019: David Warner II has launched a new initiative to help anyone who wants to create their first PnP contribution. It is called Sharing Is Caring and you can register to attend a live online hands-on session where he walks you through step-by-step instructions to create your first pull request.
• August 25, 2019: Thanks to Bert Jansen for providing us with details for the SharePoint/sp-dev-modernization repository.
• August 23, 2019: Erwin van Hunen Tweeted to remind us about SharePoint/PnP-Sites-Core. It is so foundational to other components, I don’t know how we missed it. Urgh! I hate to disappoint someone I hold in such high regard! Sorry!
• August 23, 2019: Waldek Mastykarz rightly pointed out that we forgot the PnPjs repository.