Support & contributing guidelines

June 1, 2025 ยท View on GitHub

Do you have feature requests, questions or would you like to report a bug? Please follow these guidelines when posting on the issue list.

Feature requests

Please provide the following information:

  • The current NLog version
  • Any current work-arounds
  • Example of the config when implemented. Please use fenced code blocks.
  • Pull requests and unit tests are welcome!

Questions

Please provide the following information:

  • The current NLog version
  • The current config (xml or code). Please use fenced code blocks.
  • If relevant: the current result (Including full exception details if any)
  • If relevant: the expected result

Bug reports

Please provide the following information:

  • The current NLog version
  • The error message and stacktrace. Please use fenced code blocks.
  • The internal log, Debug level. See Internal Logging
  • The current result
  • The expected result
  • Any current work-arounds
  • The current config (xml or code). Please use fenced code blocks.
  • Pull requests and unit tests are welcome!

Pull requests

Unit tests are really appreciated!

Please document any public method and property. Document why and not how. At least required:

  • Method: Summary, param and return.
  • Property: Summary

Multiple .NET versions

Keep in mind that multiple versions of .NET are supported. Some methods are not available in all .NET versions. The following conditional compilation symbols can be used:

#if NET35
#if NETFRAMEWORK
#if NETSTANDARD2_1_OR_GREATER

.NET Framework is now the odd one, so focus should be on using NETFRAMEWORK to mark code that doesn't support NetStandard or NetCore.

Contributing

As the current NLog team is a small team, we cannot fix every bug or implement every feature on our own. So contributions are really appreciated!

If you like to start with a small task, then up-for-grabs are nice to start with.

Please note, we have a dev and master branch

  • master is for pure bug fixes and targets NLog 5.x
  • dev targets NLog 6

A good way to get started (flow)

  1. Fork the NLog repos.
  2. Create a new branch in you current repos from the 'dev' branch. (critical bugfixes from 'master')
  3. 'Check out' the code with Git or GitHub Desktop
  4. Push commits and create a Pull Request (PR) to NLog

Please note: bugfixes should target the master branch, others the dev branch (NLog 6)

Update your fork

Is your fork not up-to-date with the NLog code? Most of the time that isn't a problem. But if you like to "sync back" the changes to your repository, execute the following command:

The first time:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/NLog/NLog.git

After that you repository will have two remotes. You could update your remote (the fork) in the following way:

git fetch upstream
git checkout <your feature branch>
git rebase upstream/master
..fix if needed and
git push -f

if rebase won't work well, use git merge master as alternative.

It's also possible to send a PR in the opposite direction, but that's not preferred as it will pollute the commit log.

How to build

Use Visual Studio 2022 and open the solution 'NLog.sln'.

For building in the cloud we use:

  • AppVeyor for Windows- and Linux-builds
  • SonarQube for code coverage

Trying to build your fork in the cloud? Check this how-to

Note: master points to NLog 5.x and dev to NLog 6

List of NLog extensions

NLog Project Homepage provides a list of available NLog Targets and Layouts

To add a new NLog extension, then just create pull-request here:

Updating the relevant file: