Skip to content

CONTRIBUTING.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
65 lines (41 loc) · 4.67 KB

CONTRIBUTING.md

File metadata and controls

65 lines (41 loc) · 4.67 KB

Contributing

Thank you for your interest in contributing to this project.

Acknowledgments

This project would not exist without AppFlowy and the incredible work of the AppFlowy team. They have built a world-class open-source collaboration platform — a real alternative to Notion — and made it available to everyone under AGPL-3.0. The backend (AppFlowy Cloud), the desktop and mobile clients (AppFlowy), the real-time collaboration engine, the AI features — all open source. That is a rare and meaningful commitment.

This repository is a community wrapper that adds security hardening to the official Docker Compose deployment. The real work — the collaboration engine, the editor, the mobile apps, the AI integrations — is done by the AppFlowy team. We are standing on their shoulders.

Support AppFlowy

Before contributing here, consider supporting the upstream project directly. Open-source sustainability depends on it.

Use Their Official Offerings

The best way to ensure AppFlowy continues to exist and improve is to support them financially:

  • AppFlowy Cloud (SaaS) — Managed hosting with a free tier, Pro plan ($10/month) with unlimited storage, AI features, and up to 50 team members. If you don't need self-hosting, this is the easiest way to use AppFlowy and support the team simultaneously.

  • Self-Hosted Licenses — For organizations that require self-hosted deployments with official support, SLAs, priority bug fixes, and enterprise features. If you're running AppFlowy for your company, this is the right path.

  • AI Add-ons — AppFlowy AI MAX ($8/month) gives access to advanced models (GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude) with unlimited responses. Vault Workspace ($6/month) enables local AI processing with zero data transfer.

Contribute Upstream

  • Star AppFlowy on GitHub — Visibility matters. Stars help attract contributors and signal community support.
  • Report bugs — Found a bug in AppFlowy Cloud itself (not in this hardening wrapper)? Report it upstream where the core team can fix it.
  • Submit pull requests — Code contributions to the official repository benefit the entire community.
  • Join the community — The AppFlowy Discord is active and welcoming.

Contributing to This Project

This project focuses specifically on the Docker Compose deployment layer — security hardening, container configuration, networking, and setup automation. It does not modify AppFlowy Cloud itself.

What We Accept

  • Security improvements — better hardening, new security measures, vulnerability fixes
  • Configuration fixes — corrections to docker-compose.yml, nginx/Angie configs, environment variables
  • Setup script improvements — better error handling, new platform support, UX improvements
  • Documentation — clearer instructions, additional troubleshooting tips, new deployment scenarios
  • Version bumps — updating pinned image versions and SHA256 digests when new releases are available

What Belongs Upstream

If your change involves modifying how AppFlowy Cloud works (not how it's deployed), it belongs in the official repositories:

How to Contribute

  1. Open an issue first — describe what you want to change and why. This avoids wasted effort on changes that might not align with the project's goals.
  2. Fork and branch — create a feature branch from main.
  3. Test your changes — run bash setup.sh in a clean environment and verify all 9 services start healthy.
  4. Keep commits atomic — one logical change per commit, clear commit messages.
  5. Submit a pull request — reference the issue, describe what changed, and include testing steps.

Guidelines

  • Keep it simple. This project values minimalism — don't add complexity that isn't necessary.
  • Security first. Every change should maintain or improve the security posture.
  • Don't break the setup script. It should work on a fresh clone with no prerequisites beyond Docker.
  • Test on both amd64 and arm64 if possible. AppFlowy Cloud supports both architectures.