Custom Compliance

Platforms supported: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket

The compliance tool performs comprehensive compliance checks on PR code changes, validating them against security standards, ticket requirements, and custom organizational compliance checklists, thereby helping teams, enterprises, and agents maintain consistent code quality and security practices while ensuring that development work aligns with business requirements.

Setting Up Custom Compliance

Each compliance is defined in a YAML file as follows:

• title (required): A clear, descriptive title that identifies what is being checked

• compliance_label (required): Determines whether this compliance generates labels for non-compliance issues (set to true or false)

• objective (required): A detailed description of the goal or purpose this compliance aims to achieve

• success_criteria and failure_criteria (at least one required; both recommended): Define the conditions for compliance

Example of a compliance checklist

# pr_compliance_checklist.yaml
pr_compliances:
  - title: "Error Handling"
    compliance_label: true
    objective: "All external API calls must have proper error handling"
    success_criteria: "Try-catch blocks around external calls with appropriate logging"
    failure_criteria: "External API calls without error handling or logging"

...

Writing effective compliance checklists

• Avoid overly complex or subjective compliances that are hard to verify

• Keep compliances focused on security, business requirements, and critical standards

• Use clear, actionable language that developers can understand

• Focus on meaningful compliance requirements, not style preferences

Ready-to-use compliance templates

For production-ready compliance checklist templates organized by programming languages and technology stacks, check out the PR Compliance Templates repository.

Local Compliance Checklists

For basic usage, create a pr_compliance_checklist.yaml file in your repository's root directory containing the compliance requirements specific to your repository.

The AI model will use this pr_compliance_checklist.yaml file as a reference, and if the PR code violates any of the compliance requirements, it will be shown in the compliance tool's comment.

Global Hierarchical Compliance

Qodo Merge supports hierarchical compliance checklists using a dedicated global configuration repository.

Setting up global hierarchical compliance

1. Create a new repository named pr-agent-settings in your organization or workspace.

2. Build the folder hierarchy in your pr-agent-settings repository:

pr-agent-settings/
├── metadata.yaml                              # Maps repos/folders to compliance paths
└── codebase_standards/                        # Root for all compliance definitions
    ├── global/                                # Global compliance, inherited widely
    │   └── pr_compliance_checklist.yaml
    ├── groups/                                # For groups of repositories
    │   ├── frontend_repos/
    │   │   └── pr_compliance_checklist.yaml
    │   ├── backend_repos/
    │   │   └── pr_compliance_checklist.yaml
    │   ├── python_repos/
    │   │   └── pr_compliance_checklist.yaml
    │   ├── cpp_repos/
    │   │   └── pr_compliance_checklist.yaml
    │   └── ...
    ├── repo_a/                                # For standalone repositories
    │   └── pr_compliance_checklist.yaml
    ├── monorepo-name/                         # For monorepo-specific compliance
    │   ├── pr_compliance_checklist.yaml       # Root-level monorepo compliance
    │   ├── service-a/                         # Subproject compliance
    │   │   └── pr_compliance_checklist.yaml
    │   └── service-b/                         # Another subproject
    │       └── pr_compliance_checklist.yaml
    └── ...                                    # More repositories

Note: In this structure, pr-agent-settings, codebase_standards, global, groups, metadata.yaml, and pr_compliance_checklist.yaml are hardcoded names that must be used exactly as shown.

All other names (such as frontend_repos, backend_repos, repo_a, monorepo-name, service-a, etc.) are examples and should be replaced with your actual repository and service names.

Grouping and categorizing compliance checklists

• Each folder (including the global folder) can contain a single pr_compliance_checklist.yaml file

• Organize repository compliance checklists by creating subfolders within the groups folder. Group them by purpose, programming languages, or other categories

3. Define the metadata file metadata.yaml in the root of pr-agent-settings:

# Standalone repos
qodo-merge:
  pr_compliance_checklist_paths:
    - "qodo-merge"

# Group-associated repos
repo_b:
  pr_compliance_checklist_paths:
    - "groups/backend_repos"

# Multi-group repos
repo_c:
  pr_compliance_checklist_paths:
    - "groups/frontend_repos"
    - "groups/backend_repos"

# Monorepo with subprojects
qodo-monorepo:
  pr_compliance_checklist_paths:
    - "qodo-monorepo"
  monorepo_subprojects:
    frontend:
      pr_compliance_checklist_paths:
        - "qodo-monorepo/qodo-github"
    backend:
      pr_compliance_checklist_paths:
        - "qodo-monorepo/qodo-gitlab"

4. Set the following configuration:

[pr_compliance]
enable_global_pr_compliance = true

Compliance checklist loading strategy

1. Global Checklists: Hierarchical compliance from pr-agent-settings repository

   1. If the repository is mapped in metadata.yaml, it uses the specified paths and the global compliance checklist

   2. For monorepos, it automatically collects compliance checklists matching PR file paths

   3. If the repository is not mapped in metadata.yaml, global checklists are not loaded

2. Local Repository Checklist: pr_compliance_checklist.yaml file in the repository

   1. Loaded if present in the repository

   2. Content is merged with global checklists (if loaded) to create the final compliance checklist

---

Configuration Options

General options

Option	Description
extra_instructions	Optional extra instructions for the tool. For example: "Ensure that all error-handling paths in the code contain appropriate logging statements". Default is empty string.
persistent_comment	If set to true, the compliance comment will be persistent, meaning that every new compliance request will edit the previous one. Default is true.
enable_user_defined_compliance_labels	If set to true, the tool will add the label Failed compliance check for custom compliance violations. Default is true.
enable_estimate_effort_to_review	If set to true, the tool will estimate the effort required to review the PR (1-5 scale) as a label. Default is true.
enable_todo_scan	If set to true, the tool will scan for TODO comments in the PR code. Default is false.
enable_update_pr_compliance_checkbox	If set to true, the tool will add an update checkbox to refresh compliance status following push events. Default is true.
enable_help_text	If set to true, the tool will display help text in the comment. Default is false.

Security compliance options

Option	Description
enable_security_compliance	If set to true, the tool will check for security vulnerabilities. Default is true.
enable_compliance_labels_security	If set to true, the tool will add a Possible security concern label to the PR when security-related concerns are detected. Default is true.

Ticket compliance options

Option	Description
enable_ticket_labels	If set to true, the tool will add ticket compliance labels to the PR. Default is false.
enable_no_ticket_labels	If set to true, the tool will add a label when no ticket is found. Default is false.
check_pr_additional_content	If set to true, the tool will check if the PR contains content not related to the ticket. Default is false.

Usage Tips

Blocking PRs Based on Compliance

You can configure CI/CD Actions to prevent merging PRs with specific compliance labels:

• Possible security concern - Block PRs with potential security issues

• Failed compliance check - Block PRs that violate custom compliance checklists

Implement a dedicated GitHub Action to enforce these checklists.