# Contributing

**If you want to *use* Serena** — connect it to a coding agent, configure languages, work with
projects — [Usage](../02-usage/000_intro) is where to start. Nothing in this section is needed for
that.

This section is for working on Serena itself — and if that is why you are here, welcome.
The learning curve used to be real; these pages exist to flatten it.

The policy for a contribution — what can go
straight to a pull request and what wants an issue first — is set by
[CONTRIBUTING.md](https://github.com/oraios/serena/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md) at the repository
root; that file is the authority, and this section defers to it wherever they touch the same
ground. What this section carries is everything a policy file cannot: the day-to-day mechanics,
the conventions the code holds itself to, and a guided way into the source.

The pages, in the order a new contributor meets them:

## Set Up and Make a Change

- **[Getting Started](010_getting-started)** — from a fresh clone to a verified change: the
  environment, the four commands that gate every commit, how the tests are selected and
  skipped, what CI runs against a pull request, and the files that are generated rather than
  edited.
- **[Serena for Serena](015_using-serena)** — keep your daily server on current
  `main`, run a specific branch when testing calls for it, and let the diagnostics tools
  tell you what each edit did.

## The House Conventions

- **[House Style](020_house-style)** — the design, testing and docstring conventions, rendered
  from the project's own checked-in doctrine.

## The Common Contributions

- **[Adding Language Support](030_adding-a-language)** — the most common substantial
  contribution, mapped end to end.
- **[Scripts](035_scripts)** — the map of `scripts/`: demos that run tools without an
  agent attached, the generators, and the introspection utilities.

## When Questions Come Up

- **[FAQ](040_faq)** — the questions that keep arriving on the tracker, answered the way the
  maintainers answered them, with the threads linked.
- **[The CI Matrix](045_ci)** — five batches, three operating systems, and the reasons
  behind both; what the matrix means for your pull request.

## Under the Hood

- **[SolidLSP](050_solidlsp)** — the language-server library under everything: its shape,
  how Serena uses it, and the etiquette of changing it.
- **[Code Reference](code-reference/000_code-reference-intro)** — generated from the docstrings
  in `src/serena`, ordered the way you meet the package rather than alphabetically: readable
  forwards on a first pass, a lookup afterwards.