Help us

We need you!

Thank you for your interest in helping us – we would love to see you get involved! Your contribution will help a large group of users make beautifully typeset music.

Even working on small tasks can have a big impact: taking care of them allows experienced developers to work on advanced tasks instead of spending time on those simple tasks.

For a multi-faceted project like LilyPond, sometimes it’s tough to know where to begin. In addition to the avenues proposed below, you can send an e-mail to the lilypond-devel@gnu.org mailing list, and we’ll help you to get started.

Simple tasks

No programming skills required!

  • Mailing list support: answer questions from fellow users. (This may entail helping them navigate the online documentation; in such cases it may sometimes be appropriate to point them to version-agnostic URL paths such as ‘latest’ or ‘stable’, which are automatically redirected.)
  • Bug reporting: help users create proper Bug reports, and/or join the Bug Squad to organize Issues.
  • Documentation: small changes can be proposed by following the guidelines for Documentation suggestions.
  • LilyPond Snippet Repository (LSR): create and fix snippets following the guidelines in Adding and editing snippets.
  • Discussions, reviews, and testing: the developers often ask for feedback about new documentation, potential syntax changes, and testing new features. Please contribute to these discussions!

Advanced tasks

These jobs generally require that you have the source code and can compile LilyPond.

Nota: We suggest that contributors using Windows or macOS do not attempt to set up their own development environment; instead, use Lilydev as discussed in Quick start.

Contributors using Linux or FreeBSD may also use Lilydev, but if they prefer their own development environment, they should read Working with source code, and Compiling.

Begin by reading Summary for experienced developers.