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Contributing to InstaCRUD

Contributions are warmly welcomed! Whether you've fixed a bug, improved performance, or built something that could benefit everyone — we'd love to hear from you. This page explains how to contribute in a way that works well for everyone.

The Philosophy​

InstaCRUD aims to stay generic and lightweight. The goal is to be a solid foundation that anyone can fork and build upon — not a monolith that tries to do everything for everyone.

This means that highly specific features tailored to a particular industry, workflow, or niche use case may not be the right fit for the core project, even if they're well-built and useful to you. If your contribution is very domain-specific, forking and maintaining it separately is often the better path — and there's nothing wrong with that at all.

When in doubt, open an issue or discussion first to share your idea. We're happy to talk it through.

Using AI for Development​

We fully encourage using AI tools — including Claude Code — to help write code. AI can dramatically speed up development and help you produce well-structured code.

That said, please do a careful manual review before submitting. AI-generated code can occasionally introduce subtle issues, miss edge cases, or add unnecessary complexity. A quick read-through before opening a PR goes a long way toward keeping the codebase clean and trustworthy.

Pull Request Guidelines​

When you're ready to submit, please include:

  • A clear description of what the change does and why it's useful
  • A screenshot or short video if the change is visual or affects the UI — this makes review much easier and faster
  • All tests passing in live mode — both backend and frontend tests should run and pass against a real environment before submission (not just in mock/unit mode). Running them locally with the app running is completely sufficient — no CI pipeline or staging server needed

The more context you provide, the smoother the review process will be for everyone.

Upstream Contribution​

The Fork and Keep Updated guide walks through the mechanics of creating a branch and opening a pull request against the main InstaCRUD repository.

Once your PR is open, we'll review it, may suggest some adjustments, and if it's a good fit — merge it in so the whole community benefits.

Thank you for contributing!