5th Annual Hacktoberfest Kicks Off Today, Updated Rules Require 5 Pull Requests to Earn a T-shirt

DigitalOcean, along with GitHub and new partner Twilio, are sponsoring the 5th annual Hacktoberfest. The event was created to encourage participants to make meaningful contributions to open source projects. Last year 31,901 completed the challenge, opening 239,164 pull requests in 64,166 repositories.

In previous years, participants were required to submit four pull requests to GitHub-hosted public repositories during the month of October in order to earn a limited edition Hacktoberfest t-shirt. The event’s organizers have increased the number of required PRs to five this year and only the first 50,000 will earn a t-shirt.

No open source project is too small to benefit from Hacktoberfest. Maintainers who want to attract new contributors can apply the “Hacktoberfest” label to issues that are appropriate for newcomers to work on. A few projects are highlighted on the event’s homepage and there are already more than 17,000 issues designated for Hacktoberfest that are ready for contributors to tackle over the next 31 days.