Automatically open a pull request for repositories that have no CONTRIBUTING.md file for a targeted set of repositories.

This code is for a GitHub Action that opens pull requests in the repositories that have a specified repository topic and also don't have a CONTRIBUTING.md file.

It is desirable, for example, for all Open Source and InnerSource projects to have a CONTRIBUTING.md file that specifies for new contributors what the processes and procedures are for making a new contribution. This has been done in some large GitHub customers organizations.

• It pulls a list of labelled repositories from a repos.json which can be generated by the InnerSource-Crawler GitHub Action.
• It opens a pull request in each of those repositories which adds the CONTRIBUTING.md file with some template contents.

1. Create a repository to host this GitHub Action or select an existing repository.
2. Create the env values from the sample workflow below (GH_TOKEN, GH_ACTOR, PR_TITLE, PR_BODY, and ORGANIZATION) with your information as repository secrets. More info on creating secrets can be found here. Note: Your GitHub token will need to have read/write access to all the repositories in the repos.json file.
3. Copy the below example workflow to your repository and put it in the .github/workflows/ directory with the file extension .yml (ie. .github/workflows/auto-contrib-file.yml)

Below are the allowed configuration options:

This action can be configured to authenticate with GitHub App Installation or Personal Access Token (PAT). If all configuration options are provided, the GitHub App Installation configuration has precedence. You can choose one of the following methods to authenticate:

name: Find proper repos and open CONTRIBUTING.md prs

on:
  workflow_dispatch:

permissions:
  contents: read

jobs:
  build:
    name: Open CONTRIBUTING.md in OSS if it doesnt exist
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: read
      pull-requests: write

    steps:
    - name: Checkout code
      uses: actions/checkout@v4
    
    - name: Find OSS repository in organization
      uses: docker://ghcr.io/zkoppert/innersource-crawler:v1
      env:
        GH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GH_TOKEN }}
        ORGANIZATION: ${{ secrets.ORGANIZATION }}
        TOPIC: open-source

    - name: Open pull requests in OSS repository that are missing contrib files
      uses: docker://ghcr.io/github/automatic-contrib-prs:v2
      env:
        GH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GH_TOKEN }}
        ORGANIZATION: ${{ secrets.ORGANIZATION }}
        GH_ACTOR: ${{ secrets.GH_ACTOR }}
        PR_TITLE: ${{ secrets.PR_TITLE }}
        PR_BODY: ${{ secrets.PR_BODY }}

• GitHub Actions workflows have time limits currently set at 72 hours per run. If you are operating on more than 1400 repos or so with this action, it will take several runs to complete.

We would ❤️ contributions to improve this action. Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for how to get involved.

• Clone the repository or open a codespace
• Create a personal access token with read only permissions
• Copy the .env-example file to .env
• Edit the .env file by adding your Personal Access Token to it and the desired organization, pull request title and body, and actor (GitHub username)
• Install dependencies python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
• Run the code python3 open_contrib_pr.py
• After running locally this will have changed your git config user.name and user.email so those should be reset for this repository

• Install Docker and make sure docker engine is running
• cd to the repository
• Edit the Dockerfile to enable interactive docker debug as instructed in the comments of the file
• docker build -t test .
• docker run -it test
• Now you should be at a command prompt inside your docker container and you can begin debugging

MIT

Looking for more resources for your open source program office (OSPO)? Check out the github-ospo repository for a variety of tools designed to support your needs.