Participating in open source is often a highly collaborative experience. We’re encouraged to create in public view, and we’re incentivized to welcome contributions of all kinds from people around the world. This makes the practice of open source as much social as it is technical.
Some open source projects attract enough contributors that a community forms. A healthy open source community centers the shared values and norms of its members. While not all of these values are exactly the same from community to community, there is a set of core values and norms that are essential in a just and equitable software commons.
Contributor Covenant is a code of conduct that you can adapt to express both these fundamental shared values, and the special norms and values that distinguish your own community.
Adopting Contributor Covenant helps makes your community’s values explicit, and signals your commitment to creating a welcoming and safe environment for everyone.
It’s important to understand that simply adopting Contributor Covenant will not prevent conflict or toxicity in your community.
As a leader you are responsible for the safe, fair, and transparent enforcement of your community’s code of conduct. A code of conduct without such enforcement sends a false signal that a community is welcoming and inclusive, which can have a disastrous impact on marginalized or otherwise vulnerable people.
Before you decide to adopt Contributor Covenant, take the time to discuss enforcement with other trusted members of your community. Thoroughly read the Enforcement Guidelines section of the document. If the suggested actions and consequences don’t suit the context of your community, consider moving this section to another document (such as an FAQ or ‘How to Report’ page) and adapting it to your needs.
These resources may be helpful in preparing for enforcement discussions:
You can access the latest version of Contributor Covenant (2.1) here:
If you are not a native English speaker, you may find a volunteer-created translation of Contributor Covenant in your native language on the translations page.
Contributor Covenant uses semantic versioning for its revisions, so all URLs are permanent. Previous versions are available here: 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, and 2.0.
Your code of conduct should be easy to locate, whether as page on your community’s website or a CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md file in the root directory of your project’s repository.
You must add a contact method to the placeholder in the document so that people know how to report violations.
If you are using a README file in your source code repository, you can display a badge like this one 
.
For markdown files, use this code:
[](code_of_conduct.md)
For reStructuredText files, place |Contributor Covenant| where you would like the badge and add this to the bottom of the file:
.. |Contributor Covenant| image:: https://img.shields.io/badge/Contributor%20Covenant-2.1-4baaaa.svg
:target: code_of_conduct.md
Contributor Covenant is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License, which requires that attribution be included.
If your organization uses Contributor Covenant, or has used Contributor Covenant in the creation of its own code of conduct, please consider supporting us financially with a recurring donation.
Contributor Covenant has been adopted by over a hundred thousand open source communities and projects since 2014. Here are a few well-known communities using Contributor Covenant:
To add your community to this list, submit a pull request.