# Development - Contributing

First, you might want to see the basic ways to [help FastAPI and get help](help-fastapi.md){.internal-link target=_blank}.

## Developing

If you already cloned the <a href="https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi" class="external-link" target="_blank">fastapi repository</a> and you want to deep dive in the code, here are some guidelines to set up your environment.

### Virtual environment with `venv`

* **Modify some DNS records**.
    * For this, the renewal program needs to support the APIs of the DNS provider, so, depending on the DNS provider you are using, this might or might not be an option.
* **Run as a server** (at least during the certificate acquisition process) on the public IP address associated with the domain.
    * As we said above, only one process can be listening on a specific IP and port.

The client will get a **500 Internal Server Error** for that request, but the application will continue working for the next requests instead of just crashing completely.

### Bigger Errors - Crashes

Nevertheless, there might be cases where we write some code that **crashes the entire application** making Uvicorn and Python crash. 💥

    But it was updated to use Python-jose instead as it provides all the features from PyJWT plus some extras that you might need later when building integrations with other tools.

## Password hashing

"Hashing" means converting some content (a password in this case) into a sequence of bytes (just a string) that looks like gibberish.

<div style="text-align: right; margin-right: 10%;">Kabir Khan - <strong>Microsoft</strong> <a href="https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/pull/26" target="_blank"><small>(ref)</small></a></div>

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"_We adopted the **FastAPI** library to spawn a **REST** server that can be queried to obtain **predictions**. [for Ludwig]_"

<div style="text-align: right; margin-right: 10%;">Kabir Khan - <strong>Microsoft</strong> <a href="https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/pull/26" target="_blank"><small>(ref)</small></a></div>

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"_We adopted the **FastAPI** library to spawn a **REST** server that can be queried to obtain **predictions**. [for Ludwig]_"

<div style="text-align: right; margin-right: 10%;">কবির খান - <strong>মাইক্রোসফ্টে</strong> <a href="https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/pull/26" target="_blank"><small>(ref)</small></a></div>

---

"_আমরা **FastAPI** লাইব্রেরি গ্রহণ করেছি একটি **REST** সার্ভার তৈরি করতে, যা **ভবিষ্যদ্বাণী** পাওয়ার জন্য কুয়েরি করা যেতে পারে। [লুডউইগের জন্য]_"

This could be useful, for example, to expose the same API under different prefixes, e.g. `/api/v1` and `/api/latest`.

This is an advanced usage that you might not really need, but it's there in case you do.

## Include an `APIRouter` in another

The same way you can include an `APIRouter` in a `FastAPI` application, you can include an `APIRouter` in another `APIRouter` using:

    * Generating **automatic errors** returned to the client when the data is invalid.
* **Document** the API using OpenAPI:
    * which is then used by the automatic interactive documentation user interfaces.

This might all sound abstract. Don't worry. You'll see all this in action in the [Tutorial - User Guide](tutorial/index.md){.internal-link target=_blank}.

### Suggest solutions

* After being able to understand the question, you can give them a possible **answer**.

* In many cases, it's better to understand their **underlying problem or use case**, because there might be a better way to solve it than what they are trying to do.