#135- Add contribution guide

CONTRIBUTING.md

@@ -0,0 +1,19 @@
+# Contributing guidelines
+
+:tada: **First off, thank you for considering contributing to our project!** :tada:
+
+This is a community-driven project, so it's people like you that make it useful and
+successful.
+These are some of the ways to contribute:
+
+* Submitting bug reports and feature requests
+* Fixing typos and improving the documentation
+* Writing code for everyone to use
+
+## Ground rules
+
+The goal is to maintain a diverse community that's pleasant for everyone. **Please be considerate and respectful of others.**
+
+## Quick links
+
+* [Contributors Guide](https://benchcab.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dev_guide/contributing/)

docs/dev_guide/contributing.md

@@ -0,0 +1,34 @@
+# Contributors Guide
+
+## Ways to contribute
+
+We welcome a range of contributions to this open-source software:
+
+- open a GitHub issue to convey a problem or send a bug report or propose an enhancement
+- update the documentation to fix a typo, improve the clarity or the readability, add missing sections, etc.
+- contribute to the code to fix an open issue.
+
+Before contributing to the documentation or the code-base, consider becoming a member of the CABLE-LSM GitHub organisation. Doing so allows you to create a branch within the `benchcab` repository instead of working from a fork which simplifies the contribution process. To request an invitation to the organisation please [open an issue][new_issue] on the `benchcab` repository.
+
+## Contributing documentation
+
+The documentation is written in Markdown using [Material for Mkdocs][Material] and distributed through [ReadTheDocs][ReadTheDocs].
+The `benchcab` repository has continuous integration set up to build a preview of the documentation for all pull requests which means you are not required to build the documentation locally.
+
+If you would like to build the documentation locally, you can use the [`pip` requirements file][mkdocs-requirements] to install all the required packages. Once the packages are installed, you can use `mkdocs serve` from the top level of the `benchcab` repository to build a local version.
+
+## Contributing code
+
+`benchcab` is written in python 3. It is using the following packages and standards for formatting:
+
+- [flake8][flake8] for linting
+- [black][black] for code formatting
+
+### Testing
+You can use this [conda environment file][benchcab-dev] to install a development environment to test your changes locally.
+
+[Material]: https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/
+[ReadTheDocs]: https://about.readthedocs.com/
+[mkdocs-requirements]: https://github.com/CABLE-LSM/benchcab/blob/master/mkdocs-requirements.txt
+[new_issue]: https://github.com/CABLE-LSM/benchcab/issues/new
+[benchcab-dev]: https://github.com/CABLE-LSM/benchcab/blob/master/.conda/benchcab-dev.yaml

mkdocs.yml

@@ -79,3 +79,5 @@ nav:
       - user_guide/default_science_configurations.md
       - user_guide/running_CABLE_v2.md
       - user_guide/expected_output.md
+  - Development Guide:
+      - dev_guide/contributing.md