Syncophant is built in the open, and help is welcome: bug reports, testing against storage the maintainers don’t have, fixes, and docs.

Report a problem

Open an issue on GitHub. Include:

Your Syncophant version (Settings › About) and macOS version.
The kind of storage: SFTP, Hetzner Storage Box, WebDAV, S3-compatible, SMB or a cloud drive. Name the provider or server software if you know it.
What you did, what you expected, and what happened. Quote messages exactly.
A diagnostics log: Settings › Privacy › Diagnostics › Save Log…. It removes host and user names, but read it before you attach it.

Never post passwords, keys, tokens or signed links in an issue.

Testing against your storage

Syncophant has to work with a lot of storage the maintainers can’t test. If a provider passes or fails the safe-write check, an issue saying so, with the exact message, is very useful.

Suggest a change

For anything bigger than a small fix, open an issue first to describe the problem and your idea. It saves you building something that doesn’t fit.

Syncophant follows a few rules that shape what changes fit:

Never call an upload safe without proof. A file is verified only when its checksum matched.
Never lose data to resolve a conflict. Keep both sides.
Trust is explicit. Host keys are approved by the person, never accepted silently.
Secrets stay in Keychain. Never in settings, logs or diagnostics.
No accounts, telemetry or project servers. The app talks only to the storage the person connects, and to GitHub for updates they turn on.
Native and accessible. Native controls, full keyboard use, and status in words, not only color.
Only claim what works. Docs, UI and the website describe only what the app does today. Planned features aren’t described as shipped.

Send a pull request

Fork the repository and create a branch.
Set up the build: see Source code.
Make your change. Keep it focused on one thing.
Add or update tests for behavior you change. Storage changes need a test against a local fixture, never against real storage or real credentials.
Run the tests:
```
bash scripts/test.sh
```
Write the commit message in Conventional Commits style, for example fix(sftp): retry the host-key step after DNS propagates.
Open the pull request. Say what changed, why, and how you tested it.

Continuous integration builds the app and runs scripts/test.sh on every push and pull request.

Licensing of contributions

Contributions are made under the license of the code they change: GPL-3.0-or-later for the app and extension, MIT for CoreKit and HetznerKit.

Improve these docs

These pages are Markdown files in the website’s src/content/docs folder. Each page has a title, a description, a section and an order at the top.

Keep each page to one purpose: a tutorial teaches, a guide solves one problem, reference lists facts, and an explanation says why. Use the exact words the app uses for buttons and statuses.