Hacktoberfest 2025: How to Participate

Hacktoberfest 2025: How to Participate Hacktoberfest 2025: How to Participate About the author Try DigitalOcean for free Related Articles Hacktoberfest 2025: Celebrate All Things Open Source! Stop Building SaaS from Scratch: Meet the SeaNotes Starter Kit Powered by DigitalOcean Hatch: Why Uxify’s Founders Always Choose DigitalOcean By Haimantika Mitra Engineer & Writer Published: September 29, 2025 3 min read Hacktoberfest registrations are live, and we’re just a few days away from kicking off the month-long celebration of open source. Every October, developers from all over the world come together to contribute their skills, big and small, to open-source projects. Code is the most common way people participate, but that’s not the only way you can help. Open source thrives on more than just commits. It needs documentation, testing, design, writing, and so much more. Before we get into the how, let’s cover the basics. First, the rules of Hacktoberfest: Register anytime before October 31. Contribute to projects on GitHub or GitLab that have the hacktoberfest topic. hacktoberfest Submit at least 6 high-quality pull/merge requests between October 1 and October 31. These need to be accepted by project maintainers to count. Rewards: Everyone who signs up and gets at least one PR merged, gets a digital badge from Holopin (you can get up to 4 badges). If you’re among the first 10,000 people to complete 6 merged PRs/MRs, you’ll also get a limited edition Hactoberfest 2025 t-shirt.