Hey everybody, welcome to this brand new series, all about contributing to open source. Being able to contribute to the projects that give you and I so much value is such a wonderful gift. It's amazing that Laravel and so many of the packages popular in the community are all available as open source projects and that if you have an idea for a feature or a fix for a bug, you don't have to wait and hope that one day the author is going to sort it out. You can contribute, you can submit a pull request and you can be part of what makes the community amazing. That being said, contributing to open source can be scary. It certainly was for me when I started making contributions here and there in the community. So I wanted to create a series that takes you through the process of actually contributing to open source. What does it look like to fork a project? What does it look like to come up with an idea and build it?

What does it look like to fork a project? What does it look like to come up with an idea and build it? What does it look like to take on feedback from the maintainer or from the community, respond to criticisms? And then finally, what does it look like to get your PR merged? Well, hopefully in this series I can show you and I think I've got the perfect use case. The best ideas for open source contributions come from those little niggles that you have when working with your favorite tools. In my case, let's create a new Laravel project. laravel new and let's call it hello. We'll use no starter kit. And at this point it dawns on me.

We'll use no starter kit. And at this point it dawns on me. Oh man, not only have I made a stupid typo in the project name, but I was also supposed to install Laravel Breeze. Well, there is no way to revert to a previous step inside the Laravel installer. I have to cancel the command and start the whole thing again. And the more complex your project becomes when selecting these steps, the more annoying it is to have to cancel and restart. Now under the hood, the Laravel installer is using this package, laravel-prompts. Wouldn't it be nice if prompts supported some form of step functionality that allowed us to go back in time and fix mistakes we make in the terminal? It doesn't have that functionality yet, but seen as prompts is open source, we could change that. We could build some form of step functionality that allowed us to go back in time to previous prompts and fix any problems.

It doesn't have that functionality yet, but seen as prompts is open source, we could change that. We could build some form of step functionality that allowed us to go back in time to previous prompts and fix any problems. That would be so cool. And I think it's a perfect use case for a contribution. I've already reached out to some developer friends and asked if they think it's a good idea. It's always good to validate an idea before you spend hours working on it. But all of the responses have been very positive. So I'm quite confident in saying that this would be worth the time. So that's what we're going to do in this series. We're going to spend time building out steps for Laravel prompts and hopefully, hopefully we'll get that code merged.

So that's what we're going to do in this series. We're going to spend time building out steps for Laravel prompts and hopefully, hopefully we'll get that code merged. So let's get started.