Branch Protection for Collaborative AI Development on GitHub

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

When working with collaborative projects on GitHub, it's crucial to maintain the integrity of the main source code. This often involves setting up branch protection rules that prevent direct pushes to important branches, require reviews, and can enforce status checks before merging. Branch protection rules ensure that all changes meet necessary conditions before becoming part of the main codebase, which is especially important in collaborative AI development where unintended changes can have significant repercussions.

Pulumi provides a way to codify these GitHub settings using infrastructure as code, which allows you to version control these rules alongside your actual source code. This ensures that changes to your GitHub's branch protection settings are tracked and reviewed just like any other change to your application's infrastructure.

We will use the Pulumi GitHub provider to set up a branch protection rule. Below is a program in Python that demonstrates how to do this:

```python
import pulumi
import pulumi_github as github

# Set up a new GitHub repository where our AI development will take place.
repo = github.Repository("ai_development_repo",
    description="A repository for Collaborative AI Development",
    visibility="private"  # Make the repository private to protect sensitive data.
)

# Set branch protection rules for the main branch.
# These rules ensure that changes to the main branch go through
# a pull request and pass required status checks before they are merged.
main_branch_protection = github.BranchProtection("main_branch_protection",
    repository=repo.name,
    branch="main",
    enforce_admins=True,  # Even repository admins must follow the rules.
    required_pull_request_reviews=github.BranchProtectionRequiredPullRequestReviewsArgs(
        dismiss_stale_reviews=True,
        require_code_owner_reviews=True,  # Require review from a code owner.
        required_approving_review_count=2,  # Number of required reviews.
    ),
    required_status_checks=github.BranchProtectionRequiredStatusChecksArgs(
        strict=True,  # Require branches to be up to date before merging.
        contexts=["ci/circleci: build", "ci/travis-ci"]  # List of status checks to require.
    )
)

# Export the repository's clone URL so it can be accessed easily, e.g. from the command line.
pulumi.export("repository_clone_url", repo.clone_url)
```

In this program:

- We create a new GitHub repository using the `github.Repository` resource which would serve as the central repository for the collaborative AI development.
- We then set up branch protection rules on the main branch with the `github.BranchProtection` resource, which allows us to:
  - Enforce admin rules, which ensures that not even repository administrators can bypass the protection settings.
  - Require pull request reviews, including dismissing stale reviews to require new ones if changes have been made to a PR and requiring reviews from code owners.
  - Specify the number of required approving reviews before a PR is mergeable.
  - Define a list of required status checks that need to pass before a branch can be merged. This would typically be your CI/CD system checks, like build or test runs.

This program gives you a reproducible and auditable way to enforce development practices and procedures, which is very useful for AI development projects where reproducibility is key.

To run this Pulumi program, you would need to have the Pulumi CLI installed and have an account on GitHub. You'd also need to ensure you have a GitHub access token set up to authenticate Pulumi’s operations.

For more information on the resources available in the Pulumi GitHub provider and the properties they support, you can visit the [Pulumi GitHub Provider Documentation](https://www.pulumi.com/registry/packages/github/api-docs/).