ApproveMan is a GitHub app that helps approve pull requests with safe changes.

This is especially useful for protected branches.

Motivation

To maintain the health of repositories, it's important to set up review requirements and continuous integration to make sure every pull request that goes in is good.

For example, GitHub provides "protected branches" as a way to put hard requirements including passing checks and code review approvals on incoming pull requests.

However, not all pull requests require human attention.

For example, it's reasonable for a repository to set up a location with a user's GitHub ID like [project_root]/playground/tianhaoz95 to allow developers add quick experiments that they want to keep a record and share with the team.

In this case, if I want to add some notes in [project_root]/playground/tianhaoz95/my-note.md, there is no reason to ask another developer to review the change.

Usage

You can configure the behavior by adding rules into .github/approveman.yml.

Here is an example that, given that my GitHub ID is tianhaoz95, approves all the changes that go into playground/tianhaoz95 and docs/personal/tianhaoz95:

ownership_rules:
  directory_matching_rules:
    - name: personal projects in experimental
      path: playground//**/*
    - name: personal documentation
      path: docs/personal//**/*

Note:

• The default config contains playground//**/* if no config file is provided in the repository.
• All pull requests that modify files within .github the directory is denied regardless of the rules in the configuration for safety.