GitHub Actions

Basic configuration

We recommend that you have a separate workflow file for Qodana because different jobs run in parallel

Apply quick-fixes

To make Qodana automatically fix found issues and push the changes to your repository, you need to

1. Choose what kind of fixes to apply

   • Specify fixesStrategy in the qodana.yaml file in your repository root

   • Or set the action args property with the quick-fix strategy to use: --apply-fixes or --cleanup

2. Set push-fixes property to

   • pull-request: create a new branch with fixes and create a pull request to the original branch

   • or branch: push fixes to the original branch. Also, set pr-mode to false: currently, this mode is not supported for applying fixes.

3. Set the correct permissions for the job (contents: write, pull-requests: write, checks: write)

   • If you use pull-request value for push-fixes property: allow GitHub Actions to create and approve pull requests

Example configuration:

GitHub code scanning

You can set up GitHub code scanning for your project using Qodana. To do it, add these lines to the code_quality.yml workflow file right below the basic configuration of Qodana Scan:

This sample invokes codeql-action for uploading a SARIF-formatted Qodana report to GitHub, and specifies the report file using the sarif_file key.

Pull request quality gate

You can enforce GitHub to block the merge of pull requests if a quality gate has failed. To do it, create a branch protection rule as described below:

1. Create a new or open an existing GitHub workflow that invokes the Qodana Scan action.

2. Set the workflow to run on pull_request events that target the main branch.

Instead of main, you can specify your branch here.

3. Set the number of problems (integer) for the Qodana action fail-threshold option.

4. Under your repository name, click Settings.

5. On the left menu, click Branches.

6. In the branch protection rules section, click Add rule.

7. Add main to Branch name pattern.

8. Select Require status checks to pass before merging.

9. Search for the Qodana status check, then check it.

10. Click Create.

Quality gate and baseline

You can combine the quality gate and baseline features to manage your technical debt, report only new problems, and block pull requests that contain too many problems.

Follow these steps to establish a baseline for your project:

1. Run Qodana locally over your project:

2. Open your report at http://localhost:8080/, add detected problems to the baseline, and download the qodana.sarif.json file.

3. Upload the qodana.sarif.json file to your project root folder on GitHub.

4. Append the --baseline,qodana.sarif.json argument to the Qodana Scan action configuration args parameter in the code_quality.yml file:

If you want to update the baseline, you need to repeat these steps once again.

Starting from this, GitHub will generate alters only for the problems that were not added to the baseline as new.

To establish a quality gate additionally to a baseline, add this line to code_quality.yml right after the baseline-path line:

Based on this, you will be able to detect only new problems in pull requests that fall beyond the baseline. At the same time, pull requests with new problems exceeding the fail-threshold limit will be blocked, and the workflow will fail.

Get a Qodana badge

You can set up a Qodana workflow badge in your repository, to do it, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the workflow run that you previously configured.

2. On the workflow page, select Create status badge.

3. Copy the Markdown text to your repository README file.