Create a Bitcoin directory by typing ‘ mkdir bitcoin’. Open a new command prompt (cmd) window (it’s sometimes handy to run this as Administrator) and navigate using ‘ cd path/to/folder’ to the folder you want to download Bitcoin Core to (e.g. To install the Git CLI, visit and follow the instructions. After using both with Bitcoin Core, we recommend the CLI for now, as GitHub Desktop has a few issues and isn’t as powerful as the CLI. There are many options available, so feel free to use anything you have previous experience with, or research the client best for you.Īt CoinCorner, we’ve used two popular clients: GitHub desktop and the Git CLI. To achieve this, you’ll need a Git client. To edit, build and debug the code, you’ll need to have your fork available to you locally. This “copy” is attached to your GitHub account, so you can access this from anywhere, on any computer. Any changes made to this fork won’t affect other developers. Make sure you’re signed in to GitHub and then navigate to and click “Fork” in the top right corner.Įssentially, this will create your own copy of the Bitcoin code, that you can modify freely in your own environment.

You’ll need a GitHub account (sign up for a free one here) in order to create a fork of the repository, create pull requests and comment on issues. Prerequisitesįirstly, you’ll need a Windows computer, with at least 3GB of free disk space (some of the dependencies will require more space, but you may have these installed already).

The industry is always screaming for more contributors, whether that’s just reviewing or testing, every little helps! So, with a very strong tone here, “Don’t be scared to jump in!”.

What’s great about Bitcoin is that it’s so vast with various technologies that you can contribute in many different ways. We, of course, want more coding geniuses to work on Bitcoin. Don’t worry though, as long as you have some programming knowledge and experience, your first pull request will be a breeze.īitcoin is open-source and contributed to by developers from around the world - anyone can contribute and at different levels. In this article, we’ve produced a step-by-step guide for contributing code to Bitcoin Core, allowing developers with little to no experience within Bitcoin development to learn the basic process and start their Bitcoin Core development career.ĭeveloping with Bitcoin Core can seem daunting at first, especially if you don’t have experience with some of the technologies used by Bitcoin Core, such as Git or C++. This may not be the best, most efficient or in some people’s opinion even the correct way, but it’s the route we’ve taken so far!ĬoinCorner’s Bitcoin Core Contributors Introduction Please be aware that this guide is a very basic flow of how you would go about beginning to contribute to Bitcoin Core. 4 of the team have now contributed to the latest version of Bitcoin Core - myself, Zakk, Matt, and Jeremy. We worked together to eventually begin to understand the masterpiece that is Bitcoin and fixed some issues within the code. The tech team assigned 2 hours per week to slowly delve into the Bitcoin Core code and development process. We began a number of projects - one being an introduction to Bitcoin Core development for our tech team - in the hope that they would not only continue to contribute in their own time, but also help to encourage others to get involved. Last summer, we finally reached the position as a company (over the years we’ve chosen to stay independent and not take VC/institutional investment, but that’s a whole different story…) where we could begin to assign some of our team’s resources to giving back to the Bitcoin community/industry. CoinCorner is a UK Bitcoin exchange that was founded in 2014 - we’re a small, dedicated team of Bitcoin enthusiasts.

Bitcoin core test