Getting involved in Apache Jena

We welcome your contribution towards making Jena a better platform for semantic web and linked data applications. We appreciate feature suggestions, bug reports and patches for code or documentation.

If you need help using Jena, please see our getting help page.

How to contribute

You can help us sending your suggestions, feature requests and bug reports (as well as patches) using Jena’s GitHub Issues.

You can discuss your contribution on the dev@jena.apache.org mailing list. You can also help other users by answering their questions on the users@jena.apache.org mailing list. See the subscription instructions for details.

Please see the Reviewing Contributions page for details of what committers will be looking for when reviewing contributions.

Improving the Website

You can also help us improve the documentation on this website via Pull Request.

The website source lives in an Apache git repository at gitbox.apache.org repo jena-site. There is also a full read-write mirror on GitHub, see jena-site on GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/apache/jena-site.git
cd jena-site

You can then make a branch, prepare your changes and submit a pull request. Please see the README.md in that repository for more details.

SNAPSHOTs

If you use Apache Maven and you are not afraid of being on the bleeding-edge, you can help us by testing our SNAPSHOTs which you can find in the Apache Maven repository.

Here is, for example, how you can add TDB version X.Y.Z-SNAPSHOT to your project (please ask if you are unsure what the latest snapshot version number currently is):

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.jena</groupId>
    <artifactId>jena-tdb</artifactId>
    <version>X.Y.Z-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>

See also how to use Jena with Maven.

If you have problems with any of our SNAPSHOTs, let us know.

You can check the state of each Jena development builds on the Apache Jenkins continuous integration server.

Git repository

You can find the Jena source code in the Apache git repository: https://gitbox.apache.org/repos/asf/jena.git

There is also a full read-write mirror of Jena on GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/apache/jena.git
cd jena
mvn clean install

You can fork Jena on GitHub and also submit pull requests to contribute your suggested changes to the code.

Open issues

Apache Jena manages issues using github open issues.

Submit your patches

You can develop new contributions and work on patches using either the Apache-hosted git repository or the mirror on GitHub.

Alternatively, patches can be attached directly to issues in github.

Please, inspect your contribution/patch and make sure it includes all (and only) the relevant changes for a single issue. Don’t forget tests!

If you want to test if a patch applies cleanly you can use:

patch -p0 < JENA-XYZ.patch

If you use Eclipse: right click on the project name in Package Explorer, select Team > Create Patch or Team > Apply Patch.

You can also use git:

git format-patch origin/trunk

IRC channel

Some Jena developers hang out on #jena on irc.freenode.net.

How Apache Software Foundation works

To better understand how to get involved and how the Apache Software Foundation works we recommend you read: