The problem
“Find a beginner-friendly open-source project to contribute to” usually means scrolling GitHub’s search by hand, re-typing the same filters each time. GitHub already lets maintainers label issues “good first issue” for exactly this purpose — the search just isn’t somewhere most beginners think to look.
Expected outcome
By the end of this guide you will have a script that lists currently-open, beginner-labeled issues, optionally filtered to a language you already know.
Requirements and costs
- Node.js (version 18 or newer, for its built-in
fetch). - Cost: free. GitHub’s public search API needs no account or API key at this request volume.
Step-by-step implementation
- Download the finder from the link below.
- Run it, optionally naming a language:
node find-first-issue.js python - Open a few of the listed URLs and read the actual issue before claiming it — “good first issue” means the maintainer thinks it’s approachable, not that it’s trivial or fully specified.
- Comment on the issue saying you’d like to work on it, before you start, so you don’t duplicate someone else’s effort.
A real example
Run with no language filter, or with one like javascript, python, or go — any value GitHub itself recognizes as a repo language works. The output lists each issue’s title, its repo, a direct URL, and its current comment count (a high comment count on a “good first issue” is itself a hint it might already be claimed or more contested than expected).
Verification and troubleshooting
What we tested, on 5 October 2026 (record TNT-TEST-2026-10-05-008): ran against GitHub’s live search API with no mocking, filtered to Python, and received 5 real currently-open issues with real titles, repos and URLs — confirming the script correctly builds the search query and parses GitHub’s real response shape. The specific issues returned will already have changed by the time you run it yourself; that’s expected, not a defect.
Troubleshooting:
- “GitHub API returned 403.” You’ve hit GitHub’s unauthenticated rate limit for search (much lower than the general API) — wait a short while before trying again.
- No results for your language. Try a more common language name (GitHub recognizes its own linguist list of language names, which is mostly but not perfectly intuitive) or drop the filter entirely.
- Every result looks too hard. “Good first issue” is the maintainer’s own label, and maintainers vary in how strictly they apply it — if the first few don’t fit, keep scrolling rather than assuming the label is meaningless.
Limitations and alternatives
This only finds issues that are explicitly labeled “good first issue” — many beginner-approachable issues exist without that label, especially on smaller projects. GitHub’s own “Issues” tab with a manual search, or sites like goodfirstissue.dev, are worth checking too if this comes up empty for your interests.
Free resources
The download contains the finder script, ready to run.
Download the good-first-issue finder (ZIP, 1 KB)
Is there a paid version?
Not yet. This is the complete method. TNT Review has sold nothing to date and has no checkout, so any price we discuss in future should be read as a hypothesis, not an offer.