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CONTRIBUTING.md: Writing Practical Contribution Guidelines for GitHub Repositories

Every open-source project on GitHub eventually reaches the point where someone outside the immediate author wants to help. They open an issue that is missing half the information needed to reproduce it. They submit a pull request on the main branch that touches a dozen unrelated files. Or they send a message asking where to start.

A well-written CONTRIBUTING.md is the answer to all of those situations before they happen. It is the first thing a potential contributor reads when they want to get involved, and it sets the tone for every interaction that follows. Done right, it reduces back-and-forth, keeps the project moving, and signals to contributors that the project is organized and worth their time.

This post walks through how I write CONTRIBUTING.md files for my open-source projects: what goes in them, why each section matters, and how to write guidelines that contributors will actually follow.

Use Task in GitHub Actions with tenthirtyam/setup-task

If you have been using Task (go-task/task) as your task runner and build tool, you have probably run into the same friction I did: getting it installed cleanly inside a GitHub Actions workflow is more annoying than it should be. There is no native support on GitHub-hosted runners, so you end up writing a curl one-liner, hand-rolling a cache step, or copy-pasting boilerplate across every workflow in every repository. It works, but it is not great.

tenthirtyam/setup-task is my solution to that problem. It is a purpose-built GitHub Action that handles downloading, caching, and configuring Task in a single step so you can get back to what actually matters: the tasks themselves.

Announcing the Packer Plugin for VMware Desktop Hypervisors v2.0.0 Release

I'm incredibly excited to announce the v2.0.0 release of vmware/packer-plugin-vmware.

This isn't just an incremental update; it's the culmination of months of dedicated effort to refactor, modernize, and refocus the plugin for the future.

Additionally, this is the first release of the plugin after the transfer of the project to Broadcom under the vmware GitHub organization.

🚀 Redefining the Plugin's Mission

The first and most significant change is a decision to refine the plugin's focus. Moving forward, the plugin will exclusively target the VMware Desktop Hypervisors: VMware Fusion Pro and VMware Workstation Pro.

For a long time, the plugin carried the maintenance burden of supporting VMware ESX. While this was useful in the past, the ecosystem has evolved. Broadcom provides the feature-rich Packer Plugin for VMware vSphere vmware/packer-plugin-vsphere which is purpose-built for vSphere environments. Continuing to maintain parallel ESX support in this plugin created a confusing user experience as well as split or duplicated development focus. By removing it, efforts will be dedicated to creating the best possible plugin experience for the desktop hypervisor user base.

Similarly, support is removed for the Workstation Player which has reached end-of-availability.

This sharpened focus is the bedrock upon which the release is built, enabling a more stable, feature-rich, and maintainable plugin.

✨ Enhancements

The release will introduces some highly requested features that unlock new and more efficient workflows.

Transfer of the Packer Plugins to from HashiCorp to Broadcom

The development and maintenance of the the following Packer plugins have been transferred from HashiCorp to Broadcom under the github.com/vmware organization as of January 27, 2026 🥳 🎉

No changes are required in your configurations and plugin initialization will be automatically redirected from github.com/hashicorp/packer-plugin-vmware to github.com/vmware/packer-plugin-vmware. However, we encourage you to consider updating your configurations to source from vmware/ from hashicorp/ in the packer block.

Over the past few years, Broadcom has established a valuable partnership with the Packer team at HashiCorp, and we're incredibly grateful for their contributions and continued guidance.

This transition underscores the dedication to the plugin and our commitment to:

  • Continuing development: We're eager to invest in the plugin's future, bringing new features and improvements to better serve your needs.

  • Maintaining stability: We will continue to iterate to enhance the plugin's stability and reliability for your image automation workflows.

  • Fostering community engagement: We highly value your feedback and look forward to collaborating with you on the plugin's evolution.

As the maintainer for these plugins, I'm excited about this next step and the opportunity to further enhance the plugin in collaboration with you.

Announcing the Packer Plugin for VMware vSphere v2.1.0

v2.1.1 Release

Please update to v2.1.1 to address the issue observed in issue 651.

I'm incredibly excited to announce the v2.1.0 release of vmware/packer-plugin-vsphere.

Below are the highlights for the release:

✨ Enhancements

  • Added support for datastore clusters (datastore_cluster) for virtual machine builds and post-processing.
  • Added datasource (vsphere-virtualmachine)for querying virtual machine information, enabling vsphere-clone to select a template.
  • Added an override (bool) option to the vsphere-template post-processor, allowing the overwrite of an existing template if set to true.
  • Refactored tools_sync_time to ensure more flexible and accurate time synchronization settings for virtual machines.

🐛 Bug Fixes

  • Addressed issue removing CD-ROM devices from a virtual machine to ensure a deterministic order of removal.
  • Addressed issue where hardware configuration wasn't always applied to virtual machines, ensuring consistent hardware settings.
  • Addressed issue where IPv6 address were being double-wrapped in brackets in SSH communicator causing connection failures.
  • Addressed issue nested hardware virtualization settings to only apply when explicitly requested, preventing unintended configuration changes.
  • Addressed issue in the vsphere-supervisor Jenkins template to address compatibility.
  • Refactored support for specifying the firmware type when creating and configuring the virtual machines to ensure that the APCI layout for virtual hardware 20 or later with EFI (and EFI with Secure Boot) have the correct APCI motherboard layout.