Getting started with GNU social development

This is a guide for developers who want to work on the free software project, GNU social. It will give you a run down of the specifics behind GNU social, tell you how to get started and give you some ideas of things we need to improve the software for everyone.

GNU social is a project to create a social network. It is based heavily on StatusNet, and should evolve both as a series of add-ons and plugins to StatusNet, upstream contributions, but also as a philosophy for the rejection of centralized social societies.

We use git for our version control system. You may need to install this before you can check out the code:

git clone git://gitorious.org/+socialites/statusnet/gnu-social.git

This will give you the latest code checkout, too. If you don’t have git, you can download a copy now.

Now, you’re probably going to want to take a look around the code, try and get it running on a local web server, and then asking questions on our mailing list and IRC.