What is a "contribute.md"

In most established open source projects, you should find some sort of information regarding contributing to that given project. This could be called contribute.md or CONTRIBUTING.md or is simply a section in the repository's Readme file.

If you intend to contribute to a specific open source project, ensure that you follow that projects' "contribute". Most project maintainers won't accept your pull request unless you do.

For example, here's the contributing guidelines for Nightwatch -- a project I hope to cover in the near future.

https://github.com/nightwatchjs/nightwatch/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

Here's a subset of their document with regards to submitting a pull request:

1. Follow the usual git workflow for submitting a pull request

• fork the project
• create a new branch from master (e.g. features/my-new-feature or issue/123-my-bugfix)

2. If you're fixing a bug also create an issue if one doesn't exist yet
3. If it's a new feature explain why do you think it's necessary
4. ...
5. ...
6. Do not include changes that are not related to the issue at hand
7. Follow the same coding style with regards to spaces, semicolons, variable naming etc.
8. Add tests - after all this is a testing framework