github-distributed-owners

A tool for auto generating GitHub compatible CODEOWNERS files from OWNERS files distributed through the file tree.

Distributing OWNERS configuration throughout the file tree makes it easier to find the appropriate people/teams who own a given part of the codebase. This is especially useful in a multi-team, monorepo environment. It also has the nice property of allowing teams to edit their own OWNERS files, with approval required only from the team. With the single CODEOWNERS file supported by GitHub, you can either grant everyone access to edit owners, or you can set a smaller group of reviewers for all teams to send changes to, each of which have problems.

[!NOTE] If you're using github-distributed-owners, we want to hear from you! Please drop us a comment here. :)

Usage

Create files named OWNERS in the directories containing newline separated references to users or groups.

github_username
user@email.com
@group

Once these are in place, you can generate a GitHub compatible CODEOWNERS file by running the following in the root directory of the git repo

github-distributed-owners --output-file .github/CODEOWNERS

[!WARNING] The generated CODEOWNERS file (`/.github/CODEOWNERS by default) should be set to not have any owners if you are enforcing no diff from running this tool. Failure to do so would result in whichever group has ownership of that file needing to approve every OWNERS change, which partially defeats the purpose of this process. This can be done by adding the following to the OWNERS file adjacent to the CODEOWNERS file, with no owners listed:

[CODEOWNERS]
set inherit = false

Pre-commit

Example pre-commit config:

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/andrewring/github-distributed-owners
    rev: v0.1.8
    hooks:
      - id: github-distributed-owners

The default CODEOWNERS location is .github/CODEOWNERS. This can be changed via

    hooks:
      - id: github-distributed-owners
        args: ["--output-file=<FILE_PATH>"]

Note that GitHub will only respect CODEOWNERS files in a small number of locations. See the documentation for details.

You can further optimize the pre-commit behavior by filtering files processed with hook, like so:

    hooks:
      - id: github-distributed-owners
        files: (.*/OWNERS|^.github/CODEOWNERS$)

NB: The CODEOWNERS path must be updated if specifying the --output-file, as above.

Installation

To install github-distributed-owners independently, from crates.io, simply run

cargo install github-distributed-owners --locked

Ownership Inheritance

By default, owners of directories are automatically included as owners of subdirectories. The default behavior can be changed by setting --implicit-inherit false. For individual directories and patterns, this can be overwritten using the syntax set inherit = false.

Inheritance Example

# /OWNERS
user0
user1

# /foo/OWNERS
user2
user3

# /foo/bar/OWNERS
set inherit = false
user4
user5

In the above, changes files under /foo can be approved by any of user0, user1, user2, user3. Changes to files under /foo/bar can only be approved by user4, and user5, however.

File Patterns

Where listed users/groups at the top of the file are used to define ownership of all files at the directory level, you can specify patterns within a directory, as well. This is done by providing the pattern in square brackets, like [*.rs], with owners and set values after.

Example:

# Directory level owners
user0
user1

# Additional owners for rust source files
[*.rs]
user2
user3

# Separate owners for special files
[special_*]
set inherit = false
user4
user5

License

This Action is distributed under the terms of the MIT license, see LICENSE for details.

Contribute and support

Any contributions are welcomed!