Pull request review

Open Conduit can review each pull request in a repository: an agent reads the PR, posts one review with inline comments, waits until something changes, and reviews again until the PR merges or closes. The reviewer is ordinary config plus a playbook; there is no bot code to run.

The easiest way to get one is the review bot, the reviewer Open Conduit uses on its own repositories. Its README covers every step; this page says what you are setting up.

What it is

The review bot is a folder holding two things:

• A playbook. plugin/skills/review-pr/ holds the review-pr playbook, how the reviewer reads a PR, when it approves and how it follows up, with the review bar it applies (guidelines.md) and the architecture rules it checks against (principles.md). Change those files to change how it reviews; a repository can add to the playbook in .open-conduit/playbooks/review-pr.md.
• A config. .open-conduit/config.json holds one scope per repository it reviews. Each scope has a github entry that tracks the repository’s PRs, a route that claims them and a reviewer binding that may read, review and reply but never push, merge or open PRs.

Set it up

1. Get the bot. Fork or clone the repository somewhere the daemon’s user owns, such as ~/review-bot. Open Conduit reads it in place, so your edits are your bot.

2. Point it at your repositories. In its .open-conduit/config.json, give each repository you want reviewed a scope, with the repository’s name and the path of a local clone.

3. Give it its own GitHub App, so its approvals and change requests count as a reviewer’s rather than the PR author’s. See a second App for a reviewing agent.

4. Include the folder in your config beneath a scope that grants the reviewer’s connection and operations, then check and apply:

   open-conduit config include add ~/review-bot --parent review-bot
   open-conduit config check

How the playbook and routes fit

Two pieces of the folder’s config do the work.

The binding runs the review-pr playbook from the folder’s plugin directory. plugin_dir is resolved against the included folder, so the playbook goes wherever the folder goes:

"config": {"playbook": "review-pr", "plugin_dir": "plugin"}

The route claims each newly opened pull request as Work of its own and sends it to the reviewer. Add "drafts": true to its config to review drafts too; otherwise a draft is reviewed once it is marked ready.

{"name": "pull-requests", "handler": "github", "binding": "reviewer", "active_policy": "queue", "config": {"claim": "pull_requests"}}

The repository’s github entry sets "track_pull_requests": true, so each PR’s news reaches the reviewer under the PR’s own key. If an agent of yours is also working the issue a PR belongs to, the two hear each other’s comments and pushes and can go back and forth until the PR is ready.

To add a reviewer to a scope you already have instead of including the bot’s folder, follow a review bot for every PR.