CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to YOLOv8 🚀

We love your input! We want to make contributing to YOLOv8 as easy and transparent as possible, whether it's:

• Reporting a bug
• Discussing the current state of the code
• Submitting a fix
• Proposing a new feature
• Becoming a maintainer

YOLOv8 works so well due to our combined community effort, and for every small improvement you contribute you will be helping push the frontiers of what's possible in AI 😃!

Submitting a Pull Request (PR) 🛠️

Submitting a PR is easy! This example shows how to submit a PR for updating requirements.txt in 4 steps:

1. Select File to Update

Select requirements.txt to update by clicking on it in GitHub.

2. Click 'Edit this file'

Button is in top-right corner.

3. Make Changes

Change matplotlib version from 3.2.2 to 3.3.

4. Preview Changes and Submit PR

Click on the Preview changes tab to verify your updates. At the bottom of the screen select 'Create a new branch for this commit', assign your branch a descriptive name such as fix/matplotlib_version and click the green Propose changes button. All done, your PR is now submitted to YOLOv8 for review and approval 😃!

PR recommendations

To allow your work to be integrated as seamlessly as possible, we advise you to:

• ✅ Verify your PR is up-to-date with ultralytics/ultralytics main branch. If your PR is behind you can update your code by clicking the 'Update branch' button or by running git pull and git merge main locally.

• ✅ Verify all YOLOv8 Continuous Integration (CI) checks are passing.

• ✅ Reduce changes to the absolute minimum required for your bug fix or feature addition. "It is not daily increase but daily decrease, hack away the unessential. The closer to the source, the less wastage there is." — Bruce Lee

Docstrings

Not all functions or classes require docstrings but when they do, we follow google-stlye docstrings format. Here is an example:

"""
   What the function does - performs nms on given detection predictions

    Args:
        arg1: The description of the 1st argument
        arg2: The description of the 2nd argument

    Returns:
        What the function returns. Empty if nothing is returned

    Raises:
        Exception Class: When and why this exception can be raised by the function.
"""

Submitting a Bug Report 🐛

If you spot a problem with YOLOv8 please submit a Bug Report!

For us to start investigating a possible problem we need to be able to reproduce it ourselves first. We've created a few short guidelines below to help users provide what we need in order to get started.

When asking a question, people will be better able to provide help if you provide code that they can easily understand and use to reproduce the problem. This is referred to by community members as creating a minimum reproducible example. Your code that reproduces the problem should be:

• ✅ Minimal – Use as little code as possible that still produces the same problem
• ✅ Complete – Provide all parts someone else needs to reproduce your problem in the question itself
• ✅ Reproducible – Test the code you're about to provide to make sure it reproduces the problem

In addition to the above requirements, for Ultralytics to provide assistance your code should be:

• ✅ Current – Verify that your code is up-to-date with current GitHub main branch, and if necessary git pull or git clone a new copy to ensure your problem has not already been resolved by previous commits.
• ✅ Unmodified – Your problem must be reproducible without any modifications to the codebase in this repository. Ultralytics does not provide support for custom code ⚠️.

If you believe your problem meets all of the above criteria, please close this issue and raise a new one using the 🐛 Bug Report template and providing a minimum reproducible example to help us better understand and diagnose your problem.

License

By contributing, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under the GPL-3.0 license