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Contributing to PowerShell documentation

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Thank you for your support of PowerShell!

The Contributor's Guide is a collection of articles that describe the tools and processes we use to create documentation at Microsoft. Some of these guides cover information common to any documentation set published to learn.microsoft.com. Other guides are specific to how we write documentation for PowerShell.

The common articles are available in our centralized Contributor's Guide. The PowerShell-specific guides are available here.

Ways to contribute

There are two ways to contribute. Both contributions are valuable to us.

  • Filing issues helps us identify problems and gaps in our documentation. Sometimes the issues are difficult to resolve, requiring more investigation and research. The issue process allows us to have a conversation about the problem and develop a satisfactory resolution.

  • Submitting a pull request to add or change content is a more involved process. The following information outlines the tools, processes, and standards for submitting content to the documentation.

Prepare to make a contribution

Contributing to the documentation requires a GitHub account. Use the following checklist to install and configure the tools you need to make contributions.

  1. Sign up for GitHub
  2. Install Git and Markdown tools
  3. Install the Docs Authoring Pack
  4. Install Posh-Git - not required but recommended
  5. Set up a local Git repository
  6. Review Git and GitHub fundamentals

Get started writing docs

There are two ways to contribute changes to the documentation:

  1. Quick edits to existing docs - Minor corrections, fixing typos, or small additions
  2. Full GitHub workflow for docs - large changes, multiple versions, adding or changing images, or contributing new articles

Also, read the Writing essentials section of the centralized Contributor's Guide. Another excellent resource is the Microsoft Writing Style Guide.

Minor corrections or clarifications to documentation and code examples in public repositories are covered by the learn.microsoft.com Terms of Use.

Use the full GitHub workflow when you're making significant changes. If you're not an employee of Microsoft, our PR validation system adds a comment to the pull request asking you to sign the online Contribution Licensing Agreement (CLA). You must complete this step before we can review or accept your pull request. Signing the CLA is only required the first time you submit a PR in the repository. You will be asked to sign the CLA for each time you contribute to a new repository.

Code of conduct

All repositories that publish to Microsoft Learn have adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct or the .NET Foundation Code of Conduct. For more information, see the Code of Conduct FAQ.

Next steps

The following articles cover information specific to PowerShell documentation. Where there's overlap with the guidance in the centralized Contributor's Guide, we call out how those rules differ for the PowerShell content.

Review the following documents:

Additional resources