For the third time DigitalOcean and GitHub are hosting the annually recurring month-long Hacktoberfest, which is according to their claim "celebrating [...] open source software".

What do I have to do?

All you have to do is submit four pull requests to literally any open source project between October 1 and October 31. That means in addition to the featured open source projects you can contribute to every public repository on GitHub and that contribution will be credited.

Update As some wondered if pull requests made on your own repositories count towards the four required pull requests, Digital Ocean gave some clarification:

In summary this means:

  • The repository on which you open the pull request needs to be public
  • Pull requests on your own repos also count
  • Pull requests don't need to be accepted or merged to count
  • The actual content of the pull requests doesn't matter

What do I get for participating?

As in every year you can get a free t-shirt. And you'll learn a lot about open source and building software.

Can I somehow check my status on the Hacktoberfest?

Update I've made a little tool called "hacktoberfest-status". What it does is to tell you how far you have already come with your Octoberfest status. It is Open Source (how couldn't it be not?) and also available online at hacktoberfest.bock.rocks.

Please let me know if you're encountering any problems by creating an issue or even a pull request :)


For everything else, just have a look at their website. Ohh, and happy hacking.

That's all I have to say about it so far. Since initially writing this article I've added a lot of information. Be sure to check back again as I may add some more info during the next days.