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 guides and workflows:

Mailing list

Have a question or problem about NEST? Get help from the NEST community: use our mailing list.

Create a GitHub issue

If you have a feature request, bug report or other issue, create an issue on GitHub using the templates

First time contributors

In order to make sure that the NEST Initiative can manage the NEST code base in the long term, we ask that you fill in the NEST Contributor Agreement form to transfer your copyright to the NEST initiative and send it to info [at] nest-initiative.org.

Contribute code

New to git or need a refresher? See our NEST git workflow
Follow the C++ coding style guidelines
Review the naming conventions for NEST
Writing an extension to NEST? See NEST Extension Module Example
Required development tools to ensure correct formatting

Contribute documentation

See our documentation workflows for user facing docs and technical docs
For making changes to the PyNEST APIs, see our PyNEST API template
If you have a Python example network to contribute, please refer to our PyNEST example template

Adding models to NEST

If you are looking at creating a new model, please consider NESTML: a modeling language supporting neuron and synapse specification, based on the syntax of Python.