About contributing to plc4x and potential gsoc 2026 participation

[Aaditya1611]

Hii everyone, I am interested in contributing to this project, I am currently reading the documentations, reading code and trying to understand how things work here. I can work in the area of java drivers.

I want to understand the community roadmap, Does Plc4x have plans to announce project in upcoming GSOC 2026 event and is there some advise for me to get involved and start making contributions as soon as possible??

I am not asking this just for GSOC event, i am really interested in PLC protocols and drivers development. Any guidance on good starter areas or issues would be really appreciated.
Thank you.

[chrisdutz]

HI Aaditya (Hope that's the right name)

Sorry for the late response. Was a busy week for me, last week and the whole weekend.

Hi and happy to have you.

Regarding GSOC: we have never had any submissions to that before, but that doesn't mean that we're not interested.
However I should point out that we are interested in growing the community: Simply offering GSOC projects and seeing the participants leave after the program is over, is not what we're looking for. Mentoring someone in this area requires quite a bit more work than in other open-source areas.

Do you already have any experience in the OT world? Could you explain if you're just looking for a project or if you're aiming for long-time contributions? Also would I like to hear, what is what mostly seeds your interest in Apache PLC4X.

Chris

[chrisdutz]

I guess the starter issues, that most probably would benefit the project most, would be to whip up some sort of Dockerized integration-testing solution using Test-Containers. Right now the most sophisticated tests are all located in the ManualXYZTests, which only run against the hardware in my lab. That sort of sucks and I've been playing around and successfully implemented a Docker based test-setup for Modbus in my commercial fork (I'm planning on bringing this back, but we've got loads of other drivers that would benefit from such setups)

Other than that ... there are a number of open bugs in GitHub .. you can go through them and give it a shot. I'm more than happy to help you.

Chris

[Aaditya1611]

Hii Chris,
Thank you so much for the detailed response.

At the moment I don’t have real-world experience in the OT domain, but I’ve mostly been building backend projects using Java Spring Boot for college and personal work. I’ve always been interested in going a bit deeper into low-level or protocol-oriented programming, and PLC protocols seemed like a great area to explore. Since a major part of PLC4X is written in Java, I felt it could be a good fit for me to start contributing meaningfully.

Regarding GSoC — for me, it was more of a way to find and enter an open-source community, not the main reason I’m here. Even if PLC4X does not participate in GSoC, I would still like to contribute long-term and learn the ecosystem properly.

Thanks for pointing me to the starter point, i will look for the ManualXYZTests and see how can i implement a integration-testing solution using a test-containers. i will also go through the open github issues to see if i can pick some beginner friendly issues.
if i get stuck somewhere or need clarification, i will reach out here.

Looking forward to contributing and learning from the community!
Thank you.

[codekundan]

Hi @chrisdutz ! Nice to read all the comments above. I too am interested in contributing to Apache PLC4x. But what I found out was that without much documentation it is difficult to know where to start. PLC4X has many protocols in it and how they all are managed. Also I didn't know what is SPI? So you see as a beginner or even fresher it is hard to know where to start. I believe some effort should be made for making freshers or beginners interest in this project. This will really help PLC4X community a lot. Also mentoring from you will surely help beginners like me in this project. Peace.

[chrisdutz]

Well ... I think Apache PLC4X is not the ideal entry-level project.

As I mentioned before, it actually requires you to invest quite a bit upfront to really seriously benefit of participation (Both learning things and probably even investing money).

Our community used to exist mostly from one of the three "persona types":

1. Senior Software engineers with quite a bit of experience, that wanted to open a new market for offering consulting services
2. Senior Automation engineers, wanting to make their life easier by scratching their own itches
3. People generally interested in the topic (These usually participate on higher levels)

As I mentioned, most people of category 1 are facing the issue that their involvement hasn't been rewarded in the last 9 Years (in my case). I'm currently trying another approach, but most have left or drastically reduced their involvement.
Category 2 also has shrunk quite a bit, however I still think it's the biggest group still actively contributing as they are the only ones having a direct benefit from participation.
Category 3 is pretty much been constant.

A strong category 1 and small category 2 would result in awesome drivers, that probably would not fit the needs of the automation industry. Our current balance, which is the opposite way around, results in strong industrial alignment, however it's lacking quite a bit of architectural oversight and software engineering best-practices. Causing technical debt to grow.

The project would be in need of more category 1 people - to sort of gain a balance again - at least from my perspective. The project needs more guidance from senior software engineers in order to prevent tech-debt piling up. Juniors however - at first - simply add work for the seniors (both IT and OT), especially in PLC4X, as much guidance is needed.

So we have grown quite cautious. Especially, with the increasing number of juniors showing up, using AI and vibe-coding, thinking to bring benefit to the projects, but mostly just for growing "virtual reputation" for their own careers. As soon as they have submitted "their" contributions, they usually disappear. Usually these types of contributions are a net-waste of energy for the project as the amount of work required to get the contributions into shape by far outweighs the benefit to the project. If the mentors had simply implemented the changes themselves, they probably would have needed a third of what they needed to put in by mentoring someone.

This usually is the way it would go, because we'd hope to grow the community with fresh blood. But the last few years have shown us: If there's not an intrinsic motivation for contributing (you need PLC4X drivers for your product or your job), the contributions are not sustainable and cost the community more than it's getting back.

That being said: If you folks show us that you are able and willing to do a lot of the learning on your own, I (an I assume others) will be more than willing to help you.

One proposal from my side would be: If you started writing exactly that documentation that you are missing. I would like to help you with that, but only in form of guiding you. This way you learn a lot and you would make it easier for the next junior showing up (If you decided to leave after that).

[codekundan]

@chrisdutz I understand. Count me in. I will have to read the code and then start documenting it. Just be patient with my silly and beginners questions. Also i have a job, so all this will happen at my free time. Peace.

[chrisdutz]

Looking forward to it :-)

[Aaditya1611]

Hey chris,

Thanks for a detailed explanation about the project current status and expectations from the beginners like me. I am looking forward to making meaningful contributions to the project.

So about the codesys and a test container setup you told me earlier, i have been looking up to them and here's what i understand so far. The codesys Ide itself is native to windows only, so running it directly inside a docker container is kind of tricky and may not be an ideal solution. But the codesys control for linux SL runtime which can be installed through the codesys ide over ssh does allow to run a virtual PLC inside a linux machine and we can communicate and deploy programs to it with codesys Ide.

As of now i do not fully understand or know if we can directly deploy a program on the virtual PLC without using the codesys Ide, and there may be a few more limitations that I’m not aware of yet.

So for now, I can make a docker container with the codesys virtual PLC running inside it. Once the SoftPLC is running in a container, we can expose its communication ports and interact with it using PLC4X. It can remove the hurdle of setting up a virtual machine with linux setup on it or even using a separate linux machine where the virtual PLC can run.

I will look into this more and try to find if there is a way to deploy and test the programs directly with the codesys control for linux SL runtime virtual PLC. And sorry for a late response, i was a little busy with my college stuff.

Thank you.