How to Code Of Conduct

Finally, a code of conduct helps set ground rules for behavior for your project’s participants. This is especially valuable if you’re launching an open source project for a community or company. A code of conduct empowers you to facilitate healthy, constructive community behavior, which will reduce your stress as a maintainer.

For more information, check out our Code of Conduct guide.

In addition to communicating how you expect participants to behave, a code of conduct also tends to describe who these expectations apply to, when they apply, and what to do if a violation occurs.

Much like open source licenses, there are also emerging standards for codes of conduct, so you don’t have to write your own. The Contributor Covenant is a drop-in code of conduct that is used by over 40,000 open source projects, including Kubernetes, Rails, and Swift. No matter which text you use, you should be prepared to enforce your code of conduct when necessary.

Paste the text directly into a CODE_OF_CONDUCT file in your repository. Keep the file in your project’s root directory so it’s easy to find, and link to it from your README.