News

AWS Puts Documentation on GitHub, Solicits Pull Requests

• By David Ramel
• March 19, 2018

As part of an ongoing effort to open source developer guides and other documentation, Amazon Web Services has just published many more repositories on GitHub, inviting community developers to contribute with edits, bug fixes and other improvements.

The cloud giant previously open sourced AWS SDK developer guides, putting them under the awsdocs organization repo.

Now, it has added more than 138 new developer and user guides to the source code repository platform, with Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr inviting developers to get in on the action and help the core team maintain and improve the documentation via forks and pull requests.

"You can fix bugs, improve code samples (or submit new ones), add detail, and rewrite sentences and paragraphs in the interest of accuracy or clarity," Barr said in a post last week. "You can also look at the commit history in order to learn more about new feature and service launches and to track improvements to the documents."

AWS documentation teams will try to respond to pull requests within 48 hours, deciding whether to accept them, reject them or contact the submitter for more information.

"As is the case with most open source projects, a steady stream of focused, modest-sized pull requests is preferable to the occasional king-sized request with dozens of edits inside," Barr said.

The "Amazon Web Services - Documentation" organization on GitHub lists 148 repositories, ranging from the AWS CloudFormation User Guide to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams docs. Top languages used include Python, Java, Go and C#. Seven developers are listed under the People section.