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codeowners-flow

Programmatically manage your CODEOWNERS file.

About

Version control platforms (e.g., GitHub, Azure, GitLab, etc.) utilize the CODEOWNERS strategy to specify which parts of a repository are owned by particular teams or individuals. This becomes incredibly useful for notifying the appropriate owners in Pull Requests when their code undergoes modifications.

The CODEOWNERS file follows its own distinct syntax:

  • Lines starting with # are treated as comments.
  • The format is <pattern> <team|user>, where:
    • <pattern> allows the platform to "match" the files (e.g., * for everything, apps/backend matches the backend folder inside apps, etc.).
    • <team|user> is a list of teams or users that own that section of code. Multiple teams or users are separated by space.

For example:

# Fallback maintainers
* @company/core-team

# Backend core
apps/backend @company/backend-core

# Backend API
apps/backend-endpoint @company/microservices @company/backend-core

Issues emerge when multiple teams work within a single codebase and there's a necessity to delineate precise ownership among them.

Consider a scenario where you want to designate a "default team ownership" on of the other owners. For each rule, one would have to not only designate the specific owner for that code but also the default team. This configuration might look like:

* @company/core-team

apps/backend @company/backend-core @company/core-team

apps/front-end @company/web-core @company/core-team

packages/analytics @company/data-analytics @company/core-team

In this example, we manually appended @company/core-team to each CODEOWNERS match pattern. If you later decide that multiple teams should be "default maintainers", updating every single entry to include these new teams becomes cumbersome.

The core issue: maintaining a comprehensive CODEOWNERS file can get tedious and prone to errors.

Wouldn't it be beneficial if the CODEOWNERS file could be scripted? What if JavaScript could be used to define these rules, and then generate the corresponding file?

Enter this tool. It provides teams the capability to script code ownership rules via straightforward JavaScript and subsequently outputs a file that's recognized by the platforms.

Usage

For comprehensive instructions, please refer to the CLI README.

License

MIT