SAS Open Source Contributor Handbook

Contributing to open source projects from SAS Institute Inc.

Welcome, contributors

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SAS is the founder and future of analytics.

When you contribute to SAS's open source projects, you'll build tools that help people make better decisions, faster.

Just follow these steps to get started.

Step 1: Find a project

SAS Software on GitHub is home to more than 150 open source projects from SAS. Find open projects, plugins, examples, and other resources for extending and integrating SAS's powerful tools with open source languages and frameworks.

Browse projects Search projects →

Step 2: Read the guidelines

If a SAS open source project is accepting contributions, the project repository will contain a CONTRIBUTING.md file. Read that file carefully. It will contain important instructions for contributing to the project. It might also offer details about the project's development and code review processes.

When you understand (and follow) these guidelines, you'll increase the likelihood that project maintainers will accept your contributions.

See example

Our contributor agreement

Everyone contributing to SAS projects must sign SAS's standard contributor agreement, which is built on the Developer Certificate of Origin. Complying with the agreement does not alter your right to use your contributions for any other purpose.

Step 3: Sign your work

To comply with the agreement and attest to your right to offer your contribution to a SAS project, simply add the following line to your commits:

Signed-off-by: Firstname Lastname <user@domain>

For example:

Signed-off-by: Random J. Developer <random@developer.example.org>

You can add this line to your commits with this command:

git commit -s

SAS uses the DCO app to scan all commits in incoming pull requests and confirm this sign-off. The app will alert you if your commits aren't properly signed-off. It will also offer instructions for remediating the issue and providing proper sign-off. SAS project maintainers won't merge your commit unless you've added proper sign-off.

Step 4: Credit your assistants

We also ask that you indicate when your contribution contains code an AI assistant helped you generate.

If a coding assistant generated your entire contribution, please add the following additional line to your committ message:

Generated-by: Assistant Name

For example:

Generated-by: Claude Code

If you collaborated with a coding assistant to create your contribution, add the following line to your commit message:

Assisted-by: Assistant Name

For example:

Assisted-by: GitHub Copilot

By including these notes in your contirbutions, you're helping SAS advance responsible innovation.

Step 5: Submit for review

The time has come. Submit your pull request so we can take a look.

What to expect

A project's CONTRIBUTING.md file will detail the project's code review processes. All contributions require review from SAS project maintainers. They may run unit tests, development tests, integrations tests, and security scans using internal SAS infrastructure. In this case, they may not merge a contribution directly from GitHub; instead, they'll work with submissions internally first, vetting them to ensure they meet SAS standards.

Let's get started

Browse the SAS Software organization on GitHub.