## Contributing to YOLOv8 🚀
We love your input! We want to make contributing to YOLOv8 as easy and transparent as possible, whether it's:
- Reporting a bug
- Discussing the current state of the code
- Submitting a fix
- Proposing a new feature
- Becoming a maintainer
YOLOv8 works so well due to our combined community effort, and for every small improvement you contribute you will be
helping push the frontiers of what's possible in AI 😃!
## Submitting a Pull Request (PR) 🛠️
Submitting a PR is easy! This example shows how to submit a PR for updating `requirements.txt` in 4 steps:
### 1. Select File to Update
Select `requirements.txt` to update by clicking on it in GitHub.
### 2. Click 'Edit this file'
Button is in top-right corner.
### 3. Make Changes
Change `matplotlib` version from `3.2.2` to `3.3`.
### 4. Preview Changes and Submit PR
Click on the **Preview changes** tab to verify your updates. At the bottom of the screen select 'Create a **new branch**
for this commit', assign your branch a descriptive name such as `fix/matplotlib_version` and click the green **Propose
changes** button. All done, your PR is now submitted to YOLOv8 for review and approval 😃!
### PR recommendations
To allow your work to be integrated as seamlessly as possible, we advise you to:
- ✅ Verify your PR is **up-to-date** with `ultralytics/ultralytics` `main` branch. If your PR is behind you can update
your code by clicking the 'Update branch' button or by running `git pull` and `git merge main` locally.
- ✅ Verify all YOLOv8 Continuous Integration (CI) **checks are passing**.
- ✅ Reduce changes to the absolute **minimum** required for your bug fix or feature addition. _"It is not daily increase
but daily decrease, hack away the unessential. The closer to the source, the less wastage there is."_ — Bruce Lee
### Docstrings
Not all functions or classes require docstrings but when they do, we follow [google-stlye docstrings format](https://google.github.io/styleguide/pyguide.html#38-comments-and-docstrings). Here is an example:
```python
"""
What the function does - performs nms on given detection predictions
Args:
arg1: The description of the 1st argument
arg2: The description of the 2nd argument
Returns:
What the function returns. Empty if nothing is returned
Raises:
Exception Class: When and why this exception can be raised by the function.
"""
```
## Submitting a Bug Report 🐛
If you spot a problem with YOLOv8 please submit a Bug Report!
For us to start investigating a possible problem we need to be able to reproduce it ourselves first. We've created a few
short guidelines below to help users provide what we need in order to get started.
When asking a question, people will be better able to provide help if you provide **code** that they can easily
understand and use to **reproduce** the problem. This is referred to by community members as creating
a [minimum reproducible example](https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example). Your code that reproduces
the problem should be:
- ✅ **Minimal** – Use as little code as possible that still produces the same problem
- ✅ **Complete** – Provide **all** parts someone else needs to reproduce your problem in the question itself
- ✅ **Reproducible** – Test the code you're about to provide to make sure it reproduces the problem
In addition to the above requirements, for [Ultralytics](https://ultralytics.com/) to provide assistance your code
should be:
- ✅ **Current** – Verify that your code is up-to-date with current
GitHub [main](https://github.com/ultralytics/ultralytics/tree/main) branch, and if necessary `git pull` or `git clone`
a new copy to ensure your problem has not already been resolved by previous commits.
- ✅ **Unmodified** – Your problem must be reproducible without any modifications to the codebase in this
repository. [Ultralytics](https://ultralytics.com/) does not provide support for custom code ⚠️.
If you believe your problem meets all of the above criteria, please close this issue and raise a new one using the 🐛
**Bug Report** [template](https://github.com/ultralytics/ultralytics/issues/new/choose) and providing
a [minimum reproducible example](https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example) to help us better
understand and diagnose your problem.
## License
By contributing, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under
the [GPL-3.0 license](https://choosealicense.com/licenses/gpl-3.0/)