Prerequisite

1. Be a member of Hack for LA. (There are no fees to join.) If you have not joined yet, please follow the steps on our Getting Started page and attend an onboarding session.
2. Before you claim or start working on an issue, please make sure you have read our How to Contribute to Hack for LA Guide.

Overview

Some devs running WSL Ubuntu have been blocked by permission errors when running docker-compose up. This issue updates the contributing guide so that anyone who encounters this problem can quickly resolve it.

Action Items

• In your local IDE, navigate to CONTRIBUTING.md
• UPDATED 4-20-25: Navigate to 1.5.a Docker installation troubleshooting and, at the end of that section, add:

If you are using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and finding a permission error when running `docker-compose up`, the issue might be caused by a version of Docker that relies on a buggy version of Go. In your terminal, run `docker version` to see which `Go version:` is listed. Any version less than `go1.20.0` has a problem and indicates that your Docker needs to be updated.

• With CONTRIBUTING.md still open, make a note of the section in which the replaced content appears, so that you will know where to look in the document to preview the change.
• Changes to CONTRIBUTING.md cannot be tested locally, rather they must be tested after pushing the issue branch to your fork of the repository. Push your issue branch in the usual manner, but before creating the Pull Request, check your updates using this test URL. Also store the test URL for use in a later step:

https://github.com/[REPLACE WITH GITHUB HANDLE]/website/blob/[REPLACE WITH NAME OF ISSUE BRANCH]/CONTRIBUTING.md

(for example: https://github.com/bonniewolfe/website/blob/issue-branch-1234/CONTRIBUTING.md)

• Create a pull request with your changes. In the Pull Request, after the "Why did you make the changes" section, add this line to help reviewers, replacing the text in brackets (and the brackets) with the test URL from the previous Action Item.

For Reviewers: Do not review changes locally, rather, review changes at [REPLACE WITH TEST URL]

Resources/Instructions

CONTRIBUTING.md
Getting started with writing and formatting on GitHub