The article is intended primarily for beginners and those who are just about to publish their first project on GitHub. Those who already have published projects can also learn something useful and write their best practices in the comments. The article presents five simple tips on how to improve your GitHub project.

1. Write a good readme

This is the most important tip! Readme file is the face of your project on GitHub, how the user sees your project. How often have you seen projects without a description? What did you think of such a project? Most likely, no one will even look at the code if the readme file is empty. You should not treat the description of the project carelessly. Imagine that you write a project description for yourself, but only at the very beginning of a programmer’s career. Write so that anyone could understand.

A good readme in my opinion consists of the following points:

• Description of the project in one sentence, from it should be clear the purpose of the project.
• How to install the project, here either a link to NuGet or instructions on how to build a project from source.
• Examples of working with your project. Fit unit tests with detailed comments.
• Frequent questions and solutions. Tell us about the problems you have encountered while working with the project.
• License and thanks.

Feel free to use emoji in the project description.

2. Create a NuGet Package

NuGet will greatly facilitate the user experience with your project, it will be enough for him to write:

PM> Install-Package %YOUR_PACKAGE_NAME% 

instead of building from source. You can create a NuGet package using the NuGet Package Explorer utility. For fine tuning I recommend using the console utility nuget (a detailed description can be found here ). Package description can be honestly copied from the readme. Be sure to include a link to GitHub in the projectUrl . Publication of the package is only half the battle, you need to keep it up to date. We'll talk about this in the next tip.

3. Add an automatic build of the project and run the unit tests.

Automatic build and test run will make it easier for you to support the project. There are many services that provide such features. I use appveyor as it is free for open source projects. It is enough to specify your GitHub repository and with a 90% probability everything will work out of the box. By specifying appveyor the path to the .nuspec file and your apiKey, you will automatically publish your project to NuGet for every successful build (additional information on customization can be found here ).

4. Add Badges

This advice is optional, of course you can do without badges. But how convenient it is to see all the important information about the project in the first line.

You can get the badge with the status of the last build of the project from appveyor. Badge with the latest version of the project NuGet can be taken from here . On the Internet you will find a large number of badges for all occasions: the .Net framework version, the number of NuGet project downloads, etc.

5. Take time to the community.

Last but not least, take the time to the community that forms around your project. Publishing any project in open source - you automatically take responsibility for its support. Answer the questions, complete the documentation and develop the project.

Thanks for attention! I would be glad to see your useful tips in the comments, let's develop the .Net open source community together.