Contribute to NEST

NEST draws its strength from the many people that use and improve it. We are happy to consider your contributions (e.g., new models, bug or documentation fixes) for addition to the official version of NEST.

Please familiarize yourself with our:

In order to make sure that the NEST Initiative can manage the NEST code base in the long term, you need to send us a completed and signed NEST Contributor Agreement to transfer your copyright to the NEST Initiative before we can merge your pull request.

Report bugs and request features

If you find an error in the code or documentaton or want to suggest a feature, submit an issue on GitHub.

Make sure to check that your issue has not already been reported there before creating a new one.

Change code or documentation

Interested in creating or editing documentation? Check out our Documentation workflows.

For making changes to the PyNEST APIs, please see our PyNEST API template.

If you are a Vim user and require support for SLI files, please refer to our Vim support for SLI files.

An explanation of our continuous integration pipeline can be found under Continuous Integration.

Contribute a Python example script

If you have a Python example network to contribute, please refer to our PyNEST example template to ensure you cover the required information.

Code review guidelines

See Code review guidelines.

Writing an extension module

See https://github.com/nest/nest-extension-module.

Writing neuron and synapse models

We recommend writing new neuron and synapse models in NESTML. It will generate C++ code and build a NEST extension module containing the model.

See also https://github.com/nest/nest-extension-module for details about the generated C++ code.

Have a question?

If you want to get in contact with us, see our Contact us section for ways you can reach us.

Note

For all developer related topics see our Developer space