appsembler / action-conflict-counter

This action counts git merge conflicts in your repository.

Merge Conflict Counter

This action counts any merge conflicts in your repository.

How to use it?

Reuse the template below by placing it in your repository's workflows e.g. .github/workflow/conflicts_report.yml:

on: [pull_request]
name: 'Merge conflicts'

jobs:
  report:
    name: 'Report'
    uses: appsembler/action-conflict-counter/.github/workflows/report-via-comment.yml
    with:
      local_base_branch: 'main'  # Your repositories main/master branch name
      upstream_repo: 'https://github.com/edx/edx-platform.git'  # Upstream repository that you've forked from
      upstream_branches: 'master,open-release/maple.master'  # Upstream repository's main/master branch name
    secrets:
      custom_github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Author

Omar Al-Ithawi at Appsembler.

This action has been modified from @OliverNybroe's action-conflict-finder.

action-conflict-counter's Issues

Compare against multiple branches at once

This helps to save runs and saves GitHub comments by allowing GitHub to mark comments as duplicate easily.

publish python script to a pypi package

• makes the script more reusable outside the context of github actions
• allows local devstack inspection of merge conflicts
• allows pushing the conflict reports to grafana and other tools

Hide previous github actions comments to reduce GitHub noise

Using an action

jobs:
  hide:
    steps:
      - uses: int128/hide-comment-action@5f4b3b8e995d6c0213dbd47bbfc54374839a2ae8   # @v1 on Jan 18th, 2022
        with:
          ends-with: '<!--- action-conflict-counter --->'

Manual solution

1. List previous comments:

• GH docs: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/issues#list-issue-comments
• Rest client docs: https://octokit.github.io/rest.js/v18#issues-list-comments

github.rest.issues.listComments({
  owner,
  repo,
  issue_number,
});

2. for each comment from github actions with <!--- action-conflict-counter ---> comment hide it.

• GH docs: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/issues#update-an-issue-comment
• Rest client docs: https://octokit.github.io/rest.js/v18#issues-update-comment

octokit.rest.issues.updateComment({
  owner,
  repo,
  comment_id,
  body,
});

request: switch to comments only

Currently, this check fails if there are conflicts detected. That makes sense.

However... during our SOC2 evaluation, one of the things the auditors did was sample a bunch of our PRs at random and check that we adhered to our controls which are basically that code being merged to "production" branches must pass tests and be reviewed. We had a few PRs where the coverage tests failed and the auditors flagged those. It's not a huge deal, I just had to send them some screenshots and write some explanations for them that the codecov/coveralls actions are flakey and we don't really consider them "tests" that we require to pass. (the auditors have access to metadata about our PRs, but not the actual code in the repos or comments, etc. so they could only see "1 failing check" or whatever).

I plan on fixing those coverage checks so they're more forgiving in the future, but I think we need to do the same for this. It's not a showstopper, but since the next time we go through the SOC2 evaluation, it will be an even longer period and they'll be sampling even more PRs, I think it's likely that they'll hit some that have a failure on this check. If we can switch this to just adding a comment on the PR with the conflict summary but not actually failing, that would eliminate some annoying back and forth and help streamline the whole process.