Contribute to the ARA Community
ARA aims to create a community of users, developers, and stakeholders to foster collaboration in advancing existing and next generation wireless communication systems. ARA offers a GitLab-based platform, as part of the Open-Source Ecosystem for Broadband Prairie (OPERA) project, ARA offers a GitLab-based platform for sharing your experimentation experiences, including code, experiment profiles, and documentation. You can access the OPERA collaboration platform https://gitlab.com/aralab/opera. The page hosts various project groups such as OPERA Backbone, OPERA Collaboration, and OPERA Learning.
OPERA Backbone: The group contains projects (or repositories) for generic code commits as well as those for specific wireless platforms such as AraRAN and AraHaul.
OPERA Collaboration: The group focuses on creating and maintaining action clusters around ARA on specific domains. For example, the ARA_AIML project can be used for establishing an AI/ML action cluster on ARA. If you are interested in introducing a new action cluster, please email us at e2@arawireless.org.
OPERA Learning: The group is dedicated for documentation efforts. For example, if you would like to contribute to any documentation related to ARA, e.g., experimentation manuals, description of new experiments, etc., you can use the ARA Documentation project.
Note
The above-mentioned project groups are not limited to ARA. You can contribute to any topic of interest to the wireless community.
Contribution Workflow
You can use Git-level operations to fork the projects to your account, modify and commit the changes, and send a merge request to the remote OPERA repository. The workflow for contributing to ARA is illustrated in the following figure. Procedures performed by the user are shown in the blue boxes, while those handled by the ARA maintainer are shown in the green box.

Login to your GitLab account.
Go to the OPERA project you want to contribute. For example, for this page, we use the ARA Generic Notebooks project.
Now click on the fork button, marked with red rectangle in the figure below.
Now the OPERA project will be imported to your account.
Create a new branch for making your modification. Go to the imported project and click on the + button and New Branch as shown in the following figure.
Further, provide your branch name and source branch. The primary branch for any OPERA repository is named as master.
Note
You can clone your repository to your local machine, create a new branch, and later commit the modifications (including the new branch) to your repository.
Now, you can make the modifications (editing the existing files or adding/deleting files), save, and commit to your branch.
Once the commit is complete, send a merge request to OPERA source repository.
Select the Merge requests menu from the dashboard.
Click on the New merge request button.
- Source branch: Select the branch with your modifications.Target branch: Select the OPERA project repository and the branch.
Further, click on the Compare branches and continue button, which directs you to a page where you can provide the following information.
Title: Provide a title for your merge request.
Description: A brief description on your modification.
Click on the Create merge request button at the bottom, which will send a notification to the OPERA project, where the maintainers can verify and merge your modifications to the target branch.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out at support@arawireless.org.