This page is specifically about shipping software, you can find more about shipping here.

The four things every ship needs

1. A public repo

You need a github repo, which is set to public, with real commit history. Don't put six weeks of work into one initial commit, as we have no evidence you built it. Use Github desktop or Git to regularly commit whenever you feel that you made something or did progress.

2. A README that has enough info

Reviewers will read it first, and it's what people see when they find your repo later.

You can use this as a starting point for your README:

# Project name

A short description on what it does 

![screenshot](path/to/screenshot.png)

## Try it
https://example.com

## Features
- The thing it does
- The other thing it does

## Running locally
```bash
git clone https://github.com/your_username/blahblahblah
cd project
npm install
npm run dev
```

## Built with
(insert whatever you built this with)

Feel free to modify this, or not use this at all (even better!). Make your README as customised as possible with images, links, more about you, etc.

3. A live demo

The format depends on what you built so you should see Shipping by project type below.

Shipping by project type

Web apps and sites

This is the easiest to setup and demo.

Host	Good for	Notes
GitHub Pages	Static sites	Free, simple, but no backend
Hack Club Nest	Anything, including backends and databases	Free for Hack clubbers, real Linux server
Vercel / Netlify	Next.js, React, static and serverless	Free tier, deploys when you push to github

Don't use Render, Railway, Streamlit or anything that is a free trial or has loading time.

Games

Web playable is nicer for us Godot, Unity, and Construct all export to HTML5, which ship that to GitHub Pages or itch.io so people play it simply.
If you must ship a binary, build for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and attach them to a Github Release
Include controls in the README, so reviewers don't get confused.

CLI tools and libraries

Publish it: npm, PyPI, crates.io or something like that
Or attach prebuilt executables to a GitHub Release.

Mobile apps

Android: Preferably on Google Play Store, but an APK on Github Releases also works.
iOS: This isn't required, as Apple doesn't provide an easy way to sideload iOS apps, but an app on the App Store would be nice

Track your time

Most YSWS programs verify hours with Hackatime, which is Hack Club's time tracker. Install the plugin for your editor before you start building.

Check that it's actually logging after your first session as you don't want to be losing time.

Shipping Software